“We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshaled by acts of the imagination. How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders.”
William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 1.
I loved his lecture at the Wheaton Theology Conference this year. Would really like the read this book.