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Good Morning, Every summer, literary pilgrims gather in a field in Wales to celebrate writers and their works. With its valley of tents, the Hay Festival looks like a well-attended revivalist meeting. Except here the faithful are drawn not by The Word, but by a belief in the power of words. Once upon a time literature and faith more readily shared the same tent. Questions of doubt and belief found a natural place in novels such as Brothers Karamazov, The Outsider, The Power and The Glory. For writers there was no fear of, or literary embarrassment in, addressing what are sometimes called the First Order questions – Does life have meaning? Is evil an entity? Is there life after death? Is there a God? But then the culture reached a rough consensus that these questions had been settled (by science, psychology and philosophy) and that the answer to all of them was ‘no.’ Faith as a subject for literature was pushed to the margins of the page. Redemption, if it existed, was something a person had to find for themselves, without the help of outside agency. The miraculous was not to be trusted. This life may be a wonder, but it is random and finite, and there is no God to thank for it. The experience of faith is still an everyday reality for millions of people, a vital part of the drama of their lives. But it’s rarely re-imagined as a creative, attractive or subtle thing. When it is depicted in stories it’s often extreme: the overbearing religious parent, the abusive spiritual leader, the dystopian theocracy. Perhaps the nature of belief – the inner workings of the soul, the encounter with the transcendent – eludes easy capture on the page. Or maybe we just need new ways of imagining these things. The strapline for Hay this year is ‘Imagine the world’. And it’s an important idea for Imagination is a space where professor, poet and priest can all pitch their tents. A scientist needs imagination to envisage unseen outcomes, a reader relies on it to believe in the world of a novel; and it’s essential to exercise imagination when trying to understand the divine. Faith, like literature, can’t survive without metaphor, symbol or story. Faith without imagination becomes dry, legalistic and humourless. It’s why Fundamentalism (of the believing or unbelieving kind) fears it; it’s easier to follow rules and believe in measurable certainties than in life’s ambiguities and possibilities. Imagination is one of humanity’s great gifts. It allows us to perceive that reality is not just about what can be seen or quantified. Writers instinctively know this and rely on it because there really are ‘more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’ A novel requires and tries to justify the assent of its readers, asking them to believe in its world. Writers need readers to be believers. And when this happens a small miracle occurs.