metaphor that sober ethical reflection does not countenance. It does mean that our attempts to replicate prophetic utterance in our historical-critical, “objective” way will never echo what is given in these utterances. By “imagination” I mean the capacity to generate and enunciate images of reality that are not rooted in the world in front of us. Thus imagination moves outside the box of the given and the taken for granted. As Paul Ricoeur has seen, the parables of Jesus are a classic example of