The mythic dimension of the cultural operations of human being represent a vital location for understanding not only the processes of mythopoiesis, but also the theological dynamics of cultural change. The questions of how mythic sensibilities encounter one another and how mythic sensibilities change as a result of such encounters shed light on what we mean by culture, human ways of being, as a participation in the life and activity of God. In what follows, we will observe what is meant, specifically, by the encounter of mythic sensibilities, as distinct from the other dynamics of the flux of culture. Given Milbank’s insights into the origins of the mythos of secular modernity, we will continue to engage with his analysis of mythic difference. By a close examination of his use of mythos in Theology and Social Theory, however, it becomes clear that his agonistic understanding of difference cannot finally serve a Christian theology of mythopoiesis and understanding of difference.

If a Christian account of mythopoiesis owns that not only do all things depend upon God for their being, but that ‘all things exist in Christ’, then following Ward, we can assert that mythopoiesis, as a cultural artefact, is shot through with God’s presence: it is a means by which God is revealing God’s self to us. To the degree a myth speaks truly of God it can be understood as participating in God’s self-disclosure to creation; to the degree it is enmeshed in and occluded by sin, myth speaks less truly. Following Henri de Lubac, I argue that the nature–grace distinction can be overstated and that a paradoxical affirmation of the operation of grace within nature without violating the proper autonomy of creation is necessary in order to meaningfully express how human action (mythopoiesis) apart from Christian formation can be said to speak of God (theology). The interplay of the cultural mediation of God’s grace and God’s already-there-ness in nature offers a way of speaking about mythopoiesis’ theological possibilities without necessarily resorting to a doctrine of ‘anonymous Christianity’.

The eucharistic mystery opens the concept of mythic sensibility: narrative that reveals the world to be meaningful in a particular way. Mythopoeic fantasy, as ‘shamelessly fictive’, is a vital locus of contemporary myth-making, demonstrating the dynamics of mythic sensibility outside the traditional venues of religious narrative.

The dynamics of this movement, from un-faith to faith, has been considered in mythopoieic terms as operating by way of desire: the Christian mythos grasps the would-be Christian aesthetically before it convinces logically. There is nothing to say that this willing seduction by the Christian evangel must happen in the context of the Church or other than over the course of a long period of life. Nonetheless, the entrance into the mythic sensibility of Jesus’ life and the disruptive encounter with the parables’ disclosure of God is marked sacramentally by baptism, as the formal beginning of the Christian’s life in Christ and, through formation and sanctification, in some sense as Christ. It is a decisive response to the call of the beauty of the Christian mythos and the God to which it points. In what follows, I explore the mythic quality of names, unpacking some of the resonances that come with them. With this in mind, I examine the meaning of baptism as an entrance into Christ’s mythic sensibility by way of participation in his name and so his life. In this way, our myth-making can be said fully to participate in Christ, God incarnate, the archetype of our mythopoiesis.

This chapter asks how literature and literary criticism contribute to the understanding of Asian American racialization. It traces the emergence of the panethnic construct of Asian America as a radical exercise of global, anticolonial imagination, exploring how Asian Americans are racialized as intermediaries within the United States. Asian American literature captures the dynamism of this construct, Rana argues, drawing out an allegory for literary analysis from Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker. The tragic characterization of the novel’s protagonist – a spy cast as analyst – renders the model minority myth as mythos, reorienting its trajectory of assimilation and incorporation toward the broader interpretive totality of US militarism and empire. Asian American literature thus enables readers to trace the cocreative relationship between social formations and literary forms, to read not for the representation but for the refiguration of race.

Throughout this chapter I referred to attempts to separate, in different historical and cultural periods,'inferior' and 'superior' thinking and knowing, and to difficulties in maintaining such a separation. Some scholars, like Aristotle and Jacob argued that scientific and mythical reasoning fulfil, at least to some degree, similar functions: they both aim at explaining fundamental questions about the universe,the origin of matter and life; and they are both based on imagination, representations of the world, and they explore powers that rule it.

Although the categories of mythos and logos have created controversies since ancient Greece, they have been maintained throughout centuries together with the conviction that on its road towards progress humankind will shed off irrational beliefs and myths. However, today, the mixture of myth and science still characterizes the thinking of ordinary citizens, scientific popularisers and political ideologists. It may even permeate thinking of scientists who, whether with or without awareness, are prone to propagating ‘scientific myths’. But search for coherence takes different paths; for scientists like Einstein or Wiener, boundaries between different kinds of knowing like science, religion, ethics and aesthetics were not rigid, but totally fluid and open towards creative and imaginative thought.

Throughout this chapter I referred to attempts to separate, in different historical and cultural periods,'inferior' and 'superior' thinking and knowing, and to difficulties in maintaining such a separation. Some scholars, like Aristotle and Jacob argued that scientific and mythical reasoning fulfil, at least to some degree, similar functions: they both aim at explaining fundamental questions about the universe,the origin of matter and life; and they are both based on imagination, representations of the world, and they explore powers that rule it.

Although the categories of mythos and logos have created controversies since ancient Greece, they have been maintained throughout centuries together with the conviction that on its road towards progress humankind will shed off irrational beliefs and myths. However, today, the mixture of myth and science still characterizes the thinking of ordinary citizens, scientific popularisers and political ideologists. It may even permeate thinking of scientists who, whether with or without awareness, are prone to propagating ‘scientific myths’. But search for coherence takes different paths; for scientists like Einstein or Wiener, boundaries between different kinds of knowing like science, religion, ethics and aesthetics were not rigid, but totally fluid and open towards creative and imaginative thought.