Is it possible that indirection, deception, and ingenuity in service of resistance to dominators is actually moral and sometimes even the most authentically Christian stance? Here theologian Darby Ray suggest turning Christian behavior from the compliant to the prophetic through "christic imagination."
Ray's book retrieves a vibrant tradition, "a kind of minority report on who God is and what the Incarnation is all about." She considers the complex moral lives of those on the margins and, drawing out their ethic of ambiguity, lifts up the ethical import of trickery, cunning, and indirection, sometimes exemplified in children's stories or in women's history or in African American trickster traditions like Brer Rabbit.
"Part of what is means to be a Christian," Ray says, "is to live creatively and courageously, using 'christic imagination' to confront evil in ingenious, unexpected ways." Ray's ethic of incarnation and ingenuity therefore imbues resistance and cunning with the power of the sacred and "recognizes ingenuity, imagination, cunning surprise, and parody as appropriate and responsible responses to certain contexts and quandaries.
