What holds the world back from creating a better future? It’s a question that activists of all kinds wrestle with, and there is more than one answer. Apathy maybe. Vested interests. Fear of change.
Some argue that we have a failure of the imagination to contend with, as Rob Hopkins suggests in his book From What is to What if. We need to learn to “look at things as if they could be otherwise”, and that is all about the imagination. The book of Proverbs hints at something similar when it warns that “where there is no vision, the people perish.”
How to we open up space for imagining better futures? One project looking specifically at that question is Moral Imaginations, from the storyteller and ‘imagination activist’ Phoebe Tickell. She uses stories and imagination to build connections with nature and each other, and get people thinking about the future.
As an example, here is a story that invites people to imagine an ending:
What can the church do to open up old ways of thinking and imagine a better future?
Joy in Enough 