IMAGINATION

      My teacher and mentor, Walter Brueggemann, has written a book entitled The Prophetic Imagination. Another of my teachers, Dr. Joaquin Montero of Chile, is designing a way to get accessible and effective primary health care to 400 million Latin Americans. Now that is the prophetic imagination at work.

       What do you imagine? 

        I love my true story of a day in a graduate classroom at the School of Public Health University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was the professor of Public Health Education 502, saying to the twenty or so 30 year old graduate students: “Friends, this (Dialogue Education) is how your children and grandchildren will learn. It is coming…”

         The Public Health graduate students scoffed:” You are so naïve! This is a university. It will never change!”

         I offered a story: “Friends, when I was growing up in New York City in the early forties, my dear mother would never allow us to go swimming in the public pools in the hot summer. 

     ‘I do not want any one of my three girls to spend her life in an iron lung,’ Mother argued.

          Silence in the graduate classroom! Staring eyes: finally, “What’s an iron lung?”   Not one of them had ever heard of an iron lung.

          “Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. And I propose that you can imagine a world in which your grandchildren will ask, ‘Granpa, what’s a gun?’ Dr. Jonas Salk imagined a world without iron lungs. It is our turn, now.’’