21.67 Justin Bailey’s Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age highlights a problem that plagues certain forms of Christian persuasion: the failure to take imagination seriously. For some Christians, apologetics is a matter of dry-as-the-desert technical arguments—or of intellectually arm-wrestling non-Christians into submission. Add an evangelical ethos hopelessly enamored with perpetual culture-warring, and you have a profound problem in much current Christian witness. Bailey begins by noting that, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, we live in a world (a “social imaginary”) where everyone assumes that ultimate answers lie within. We follow what resonates with our inner life. Therefore, the wise apologist who wants to reach a non-Christian engages not with what is (externally, objectively) true, but with what (internally, subjectively) moves him or her emotionally and aesthetically. Not truth, but beauty. Not rationality, but authenticity. The key lies with the imagination. We must provide space, Bailey writes, for non-Christians to “feel their way into faith.”