Quotes About Narrative

From ancient times discipleship training has involved learning the biblical narrative and theological language of the Christian community:

Story is the primary way we impart what really matters to the next generation.

Everyone's talking about metaphor and the nature of narrative, as if these are new discoveries rather than the very building blocks of language and understanding (not to mention faith).

Youth are natural-born storytellers. Our task in discipleship training is to steer them into a particular storytelling tradition—that is, the narrative, language, and culture of the Christian faith as it has been lived and expressed for two thousand years.

Tell me a story," says the poem by Robert Penn Warren. "In this century, and moment, of mania . . . Tell me a story of deep delight.

if there is no light by which we see, no Great Story that illumines our days—and no Storyteller—then we have no source by which to enchant the young people in our charge.

Contrary to the cavalier attitude many pastors and religious educators take on this point, the Bible's narrative ingredients do matter for how we understand what's happening in a given book or chapter, along with how these individual stories fit together.

Our songs and our stories do more than persuade others that an order exists: they build the house; they weave a world; they companion our listeners into the experience of such ordered cosmos. —WALTER WANGERIN JR

Storytelling is our task with the next generation, and it starts with loving the story ourselves and telling it as though we believe it—because we believe it.

the only thing I wanted was to walk with Frodo into Mordor. Because if I could live for a little while inside a great story written by a first-rate Christian storyteller, maybe my fragmented world just might make some kind of narrative sense again. And I was right.

If we want the next generation to know where they came from and thus who they are, we tell them stories so they won't forget. Then they pass the stories on to the generation after them, and so it goes.

If we trust Jesus' own storytelling approach, we must trust the Spirit to work in and through story without the need to interpret every metaphor, every parable, every time. But

The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn't even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. —FLANNERY O'CONNOR9

The difference between a fairy tale and a sea tale? A fairy tale starts with "Once upon a time". A sea tale starts with " This ain't no $hit"!

I like doing sequels. Basically, I think it's a fun thing to follow characters in time. In real time.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

Remember: a story is not a vignette. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It is not merely a snapshot in time.

We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.

Space does for comics what time does for film!

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

I saw the dudes who would be the gangsta, big-time guys on the block, but would also be dedicated fathers. It was kind of weird to see that dual story that everybody has.