You Tube Theology

https://www.bethel.edu/seminary/academics/seminary-for-everyone/

June 1-26, 2026

Taught by Karen Swallow Prior, Bethel Seminary's 2025-2026 Karlson Scholar

We all have an imagination. But our individual imaginations are shaped by many things, including our social imaginaries. Social imaginaries are our shared pools of images, stories, myths, metaphors, and expectations. Social imaginaries create and carry assumptions about how life should go and how things should be, assumptions we often don’t even know we have.

In this course, based on the book "The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis," author and instructor Karen Swallow Prior will discuss how social imaginaries and metaphors have shaped evangelicalism over the past 300 years. Drawing on the book, we’ll explore evangelicalism’s defining metaphors, including “awakening,” “conversion,” testimony,” and “reformation.” We’ll also look at how the larger cultural ethos shaped the evangelical movement in its emphasis on improvement, sentimentality, materialism, and empire.