To be a Christian … is to immerse oneself in unstinting fiction making. Jesus’s words “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” to cite a famously ignored example, demand an arduous imaginative act. This deceptively simple line orders me, as I look at you, to imagine that I am seeing not you, but me, and then to treat this imaginative me, alias you, as if you are me. And for how long? Till the day I die! Jesus orders anyone who’s serious about Him to commit the “Neighbor = Me” fiction until they forget for good which of the two of themselves to cheat in a business deal or abandon in a crisis or smart-bomb in a war—at which point their imaginative act, their fiction making, will have turned Christ’s bizarre words into a reality and they’ll be saying with Mother Teresa, “I see Christ in every woman and man.”

—David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays, pp. 63-64