Re: RQ
Jeanette Randolph Rollins
April 1, 1996
This issue departs from our single-theme tradition by taking up both poverty and creativity-distinct but not unrelated themes.
The poverty our writers treat in these pages includes not only material and political poverty but strains of aesthetic, spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty indigenous to the contemporary West. And the idea of "creativity" underlying this issue does not refer ultimately to the realm of human imagination treated by several writers but rather to that divine freedom and generosity that holds us every moment in existence.
As the late Fugitive-Agrarian critic, writer, and scholar Andrew Lytle was known for admonishing his students, "only God creates." And Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who would never have countenanced calling human beings "creators," grew wary in his later years of even the word "imagination," cautious of "overstepping the bounds set for man," James Engell writes (in The Creative Imagination).
Langdon Gilkey argues that, over centuries of Christian theological shifts, one idea that has held constant is the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo-that God alone creates out of nothing. Holding that God is the transcendent source of all that is, that creation is utterly dependent upon God for its existence and entirely distinct from God, and that God creates freely and for a purpose, the doctrine renders the world intelligible and human life meaningful. Christians have accordingly understood the works of human imagination as secondary or participatory acts-echoes, imitations, subcreations, co-creations.
Scripture and Christian tradition reveal to us what happens when God's creativity collides with poverty. The poor are exalted, the powerless raised up, the desolate consoled. Dry bones come to life. God's ...
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