Imagination lies at the heart of faith because to imagine anything better than the given is to make an effort where none is required and no immediate payoff presents itself — to imagine, for example, a world with less violence and more love. To the extent that this statement strikes my twenty-first-century ear as naive, my reaction results from my conception of history as a linear narrative. Instead, history must serve to help me formulate my own truth and live in inside it — the ultimate imaginative act.
— Fenton Johnson, Keeping Faith