The Way of Imagination Essays

Prize–winning essayist turns to the imagination as a spiritual guide and material method of living through climate disruption, as climate change and broad extinction forever alter our place on the planet and our lives together.

Scott Russell Sanders shows how imagination, linked to compassion, can help us solve the urgent ecological and social challenges we face. While reflecting on the conditions needed for human flourishing, he tells the story of his own intellectual and moral journey from childhood religion to an adult philosophy of life. That philosophy is tested when his first wife and then their son fall ill. Compelled to leave their beloved old house, they design a new one, and then transform their vision into a home and their raw city lot into a garden.

Scott Russell Sanders has won more than a dozen major honors, including the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award twice, the Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His more than twenty books include novels, stories, and essays. He is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at Indiana University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife make their home in the hardwood hill country of southern Indiana.