Date: January 23, 2026
I shared these sentiments elsewhere last year and have been thinking about it a lot more recently with the rapidly increasing illiteracy rates in the U.S. alongside the rising use of Generative Artificial Intelligence over and against more “analog” ways of creating ideas, research, and study.
I am convinced that a significant hinderance to our ability to create new, life-enabling, and critical ideas in the world has to do with the trading in of play for technology.
What I mean by this is that our over-reliance on technology to do the work for us (to write, think, curate, plan, envision, etc.) has replaced the necessary play that humans need to engage in order to foster the imaginative capacities that help us to see and call forth what does not yet exist for the flourishing of ourselves and our communities.
We should be playing. We should be getting lost doing the things that we enjoy. We should be doing silly things. Frivolous things. Child-like things. Nerdy things. Things that don’t require precision and have no due dates. Things that allow us reprieve from the seriousness of our to-do lists and provoke us to those deep belly laughs that might get us a side eye from person sitting across the room.
When we play, we stir up our capacity to see what has yet to be seen.
When we play, we call the imagination to the floor and give her room dance.
When we play, we spark our imaginative capacities.
Play is critical to being alive because when we play we feed our creativity and when we create we expand the possibilities of what it means to be.
Playing is theological.
When we play, we honor the God-given need within us to be fully embodied and fully present in that embodiment. When we play, it enables us to create and when we create we practice Imago Dei through our capacity to mimic God’s creative power to call forth that which is not yet into being.
It almost seems unserious to talk about play given all that is going on in our society and our world at large. But I talk about play because it seems to me that we need to play now more than ever. We need to be fully embodied and stir up our capacity to imagine alternative futures with and for those who are most vulnerable among us. We need to strive toward something other than what is.
And, as preachers, teachers, writers, creators, and other ways of living out the Gospel in the world, we need to play in order to enable these practices to do the work of creating these alternative futures.
So, as we prepare for the snowy weekend ahead of us, I invite us to reflect on the last time we played and then put your phone down, close your laptop, turn your TV off, and be as childish as you can be.
The world is depending on it.
Rev. Janiece Renee Williams
Visiting Lecturer in Homiletics
Virginia Theological Seminary