worldview and perspective on Fairy Tales

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the co...

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil,...

The American writer and journalist Frank Lyman Baum found that his first book began when a band of children, including his own four sons, asked him to tell a story one night in their home in Chicago. ...

Stories are inherently interesting. Discourse we tolerate; to story we attend. Story entertains, informs, involves, motivates, authenticates, and mirrors existence. By creating a narrative world, stor...

The child became a man and the man became a preacher whose sermons were full of commonplace things: seeds and nets, coins and fishes, lilies of the field, and birds of the air. Wherever he was, he had...

From [age three] on out, stories will not only entertain you, they will explain you to others and to yourself.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.

The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.

I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [gospel] text there are only two possible ...

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. . . . The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happ...

Years ago, I read an old fairy tale about a wicked witch who lived in a remote cottage in the deep forest. When travelers came through looking for lodging, she offered them a meal and a bed. It was th...

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling....

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

“He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-...

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of dis...

Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction . . . For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

Jesus is clear that it is dangerous to close one’s ears, eyes, and heart to the leadings of the Holy Spirit. In The Magician’s Nephew , a novel from C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series, Narnia i...

"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greate...

Parables were the means Jesus used most frequently to explain the kingdom of God and to show the character of God and the expectations that God has for humans.

In 1884, an English schoolmaster named Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a story about a two-dimensional world called Flatland, inhabited by various shapes (circles, squares, etc.). In Flatland, there is heig...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...