Editors' Note: Public Discourse hosted an essay contest for students in high school, college, and graduate school. Participants were to answer the question: What do you wish your elders knew about the greatest challenge your generation faces? This essay wins second place in the contest and was written by Athena Liu, a student at The Wilberforce School in Princeton, New Jersey.
In past generations, many children grew up surrounded by sacred reminders of God's presence in their daily lives. They knelt by their beds to pray words they had memorized from church. They saw the cross above the door as a sign that God was near. A Bible, its pages soft from years of use, was more than a book - it was a treasure. These symbols and practices cultivated a way of seeing the world as infused with meaning, beauty, and divine purpose. My generation, by and large, does not have these markers. We have grown up in a world where sacred symbols feel like a foreign language. Our culture has trained us to strip everything down to function, to treat symbols as mere decoration, and to roll our eyes at the idea that everyday life could be filled with divine purpose. This is not just a cultural quirk - it is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It shapes how we understand education, family, and religion, leaving us unable to recognize transcendent meaning in the ordinary.
Consider the average classroom today. Past generations were raised on stories that conveyed timeless moral truths - parables from Scripture, myths that taught virtues, and literature that lifted the soul. Today's classrooms often strip stories of their moral power, analyzing them purely for technique, historical context, or social commentary. While analysis is important, something vital is lost when stories are treated as artifacts rather than moral compasses. Many of my peers read The Chronicles of Narnia without seeing its deeper allegory or sense of cosmic order. They read To Kill a Mockingbird as merely a story about prejudice in the South, not as a vision of human dignity and moral courage. Stories no longer call us upward - they are dissected, flattened, and emptied of transcendence. This loss in education means we fail to cultivate students' moral imaginations, leaving them unprepared to see deeper meaning in the world.
This loss also affects how we see ourselves and our relationships. The Christian tradition teaches that we are made in the image of God - that our lives have infinite dignity and purpose. But when the moral imagination collapses, we forget this. We begin to view ourselves and others through the lens of utility, productivity, and appearance. We treat our bodies as canvases for self-expression rather than temples of the Holy Spirit. We curate identities online, branding ourselves for approval, because we no longer have the imagination to see that our true identity is given by God, not constructed by likes and follows.
The collapse of moral imagination reshapes family life as well. Many of my peers fear marriage because they see it as a limitation rather than a vocation. They fear children because they see them as burdens rather than blessings. Without moral imagination, love is reduced to a transaction and relationships to temporary arrangements. This hollow view of family leads to disconnection and loneliness at the very heart of society.
Theologically, the collapse of moral imagination leaves us unable to perceive God's presence in the ordinary. We no longer see the beauty of a sunrise as a reflection of the Creator's glory. We no longer understand the sacraments as channels of grace. These are the fruits of a flattened imagination: we cannot recognize the sacred when we encounter it.
But this loss did not happen overnight. The seeds were planted decades ago as our culture embraced secularism and consumerism. As church attendance declined, the practices that nourished moral imagination - prayer, fasting, feasting, storytelling - began to disappear from daily life. Meanwhile, the rise of digital technology taught us to crave instant gratification and constant stimulation. We no longer have time for contemplation. Silence makes us uncomfortable. We fill every moment with noise, and in doing so, we lose the ability to sense God's whisper.
What makes this challenge unique is that it is invisible. It is hard to fight for what you cannot see. My generation often does not even realize what we are missing. We think we are liberated from "superstition," when in reality we are starving for meaning. We try to fill the void with activism, consumerism, and endless entertainment, but these fleeting pleasures cannot satisfy. We need to recover the moral imagination - to see again that life is a story authored by God, that creation is sacramental, that symbols and rituals matter because they connect us to ultimate reality.
There are ways to begin. One way is to recover storytelling. We need to reintroduce ourselves to the great stories - biblical narratives, classic literature, and myths that reveal the human condition. When we read about Frodo's self-sacrifice in The Lord of the Rings or Lucy's childlike faith in The Chronicles of Narnia, we are reminded that courage, humility, and hope are real virtues worth pursuing. These stories awaken moral imagination by showing us what goodness looks like.
Another way is to recover ritual. Human beings are shaped by what we repeatedly do. Attending Sunday worship, praying before meals, observing the liturgical seasons - these habits may seem small, but they teach us to see time and life as sacred. When we light an Advent candle or fast during Lent, we are reminded that we are part of a story much larger than ourselves. Ritual slows us down and anchors us in God's reality.
We must also cultivate silence. The moral imagination is not restored through constant noise. We need time away from screens and distractions to hear the still, small voice of God. Our generation is restless because we have lost the sacred rest that comes from knowing we belong to God.
Some might dismiss these suggestions as nostalgic or impractical. But the truth is that every culture forms its people, either intentionally or unintentionally. If we do not intentionally form our moral imagination, it will be shaped by consumerism, cynicism, and self-indulgence. We see this already. Many young people are skeptical of authority, distrustful of institutions, and fearful of the future. We scroll through endless headlines and videos, but we rarely pause to ask what any of it means. We are a generation drowning in information but starving for wisdom.
Recovering moral imagination will not be easy. It requires courage to live differently from the surrounding culture. It requires humility to learn from older generations and the traditions of the Church. It requires patience to embrace practices that do not offer instant results. But if we do not take up this task, we risk becoming a people unable to recognize truth, beauty, and goodness even when they are right before us.
What I wish older generations understood is that my peers are not rejecting God out of malice. Many of us have simply never been taught how to see the world as sacred. We need mentors who will show us that faith is not merely a set of rules but a way of seeing. We need parents, pastors, and teachers who will help us recover the language of symbolism and the habits of ritual. We need living examples of people who perceive God's presence in the everyday - who stop to marvel at a sunset, who cherish Scripture, who serve others with joy.
The good news is that God has not abandoned us. Even in a culture that seems spiritually barren, He is at work. The Holy Spirit can awaken our imaginations and teach us to see again. But we must cooperate with grace. We must choose to step away from the noise, to embrace the practices that form our souls, and to open our eyes to the symbols of God's love all around us. In a world that tells us life is meaningless, recovering moral imagination is an act of hope. It allows us to see the beauty of creation, the dignity of every person, and the presence of Christ in the sacraments. It teaches us that our lives are not accidents but chapters in a divine story. And it gives us the courage to live as though truth, goodness, and beauty are real - because they are.
If my generation can recover this way of seeing, we will not only heal ourselves but help renew the culture. We will raise children who know the meaning of sacred symbols, who find joy in rituals, and who can recognize God's presence in the ordinary. We will be able to bring moral language back into education, family life, and religious practice. We will see each other as brothers and sisters rather than competitors or enemies.
The collapse of moral imagination is a crisis, but it is not the end of the story. We can choose to see differently. We can allow Christ to open our eyes as He opened the eyes of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. And when we do, we will find that the world is not as flat and meaningless as we once thought. It is full of beauty, charged with meaning, alive with the presence of God.
In a culture that has forgotten the sacred, to see with the eyes of moral imagination is a quiet revolution. And it is one my generation desperately needs.