Systematic Mythology: Imagining the Invisible

Humans are composed of poetic tissues as surely as physical ones. Our identities worldviews longings--all are drawn and developed from the unique relationships and texts we encounter and incorporate. We collect and imagine stories and creatively build them into the tale of ourselves. But each of these personal mythologies is irrevocably lost at death--unless it is true as Christianity claims that God raises the dead. Systematic Mythology: Imagining the Invisible studies the ways in which we make meaning. It argues that God must be the ultimate subject of every persons essential myth so that Christ may redeem and resurrect our stories as well as our bodies. Systematic mythology calls us to consciously and creatively participate in the story God is telling through our cosmos and its inhabitants: a story in which Christ is all and in all. Systematic Mythology is a brilliant book that will appeal to lovers of sound Christian doctrine who also find the fiction of C. S. Lewis J. R. R. Tolkien and Madeleine LEngle to be greatly edifying. Why that should be is brought out by Agee with consummate clarity. --John Hobbins pastor Zion Lutheran Church of Oshkosh In this deeply original book Jennifer Agee holds orthodoxy up to the ancient light of myth and the Christian narrative shines anew--abstraction is replaced by concreteness; analysis is joined by imagination; and new worlds of meaning spring up all round the reader. Systematic Mythology bears all the creativity of the monotheistic myth toward which it calls us yet never loses sight of tradition. --Paul Wallace author of Stars Beneath Us Both winsome and incisive Agees exposition of systematic mythology parses logos and mythos in a manner that would have delighted Barfield and given Arnold pause for thought. Her arguments will evoke revaluations of Joseph Campbell and incur excellent classroom dialogue. I already have a page of quotations to share with colleagues--tastes of a book which challenges intellect and imagination alike both academically and personally. --Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson freelance writer and lecturer Jennifer Agee is a freelance editor. Her MA is from Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque Iowa. Systematic Mythology is her first book.