stories on Admiration

W.H. Auden is widely considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. Auden grew up in England but spent some of his adult years in the United States. When he passed away on the 29th of Septe...

It is a mark of the essential morality of fairyland (a thing too commonly overlooked) that happiness, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery ...

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this…. We all like astonishing tales because they to...

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...

If you really want to change, it starts with your story. If you want to change the story of your life, you need to change the stories in your mind. So what story do you want to live? Do you want to ex...

The Puritans in American Literature “Welcome to Honors American Literature!” You probably haven’t heard that line since high school, right? After his first couple of weeks of school, my boy came home...

Preaching Commentary Paying Close Attention to Subjects and Verbs Psalm 22 is well known to Christians because our Savior used this psalm in his dying hours on the cross (Matt. 46), quoted in Arama...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared that experiencing a story—any story—requires the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In Coleridge’s view, a reader reasons thus: “Yes, I know Coleridg...

“He held up a book then. “I'm going to read it to you for relax.” “Does it have any sports in it?” “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men...

The biblical writers and reciters make extensive use of metaphors, parables and dramatic actions. Jesus does not say, “God’s love is boundless.” Instead, he tells the story of the prodigal son. He doe...

I have a word for you. I know your whole life story. I know every skeleton in your closet. I know every moment of sin, shame, dishonesty and degraded love that has darkened your past. Right now I know...

An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.

The moral a story teaches is, fundamentally, to the heart.

Why a story? We all think of our lives as stories, each with a main character (us) theme, and plot (interesteing so far, but as yet unfinished). We also love to hear stories about others and even abou...

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...

Paying Close Attention to Subjects and Verbs Psalm 22 is well known to Christians because our Savior used this psalm in his dying hours on the cross (Matt. 46), quoted in Aramaic, his native language...

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...

J. R. R. Tolkien coined the term "eucatastrophe" to refer to the unexpected happy ending at the end of a fairy tale, achieved by grace rather than effort. The consolation of fairy-stories,...

The merchant’s success depends on his or her ability to tell a story. What people see or hear or smell or do when they enter a space guides their feelings, enticing them to celebrate whatever the sell...

Being in God’s story does not mean passively letting things happen to us. It doesn’t mean dumb submission or blind obedience.

In imaginary works it is difficult to make virtuous characters as believable and attractive as bad characters. The villains of literature and screen–Captain Ahab, the boys who go bad in Lord of the Fl...

There is power in bringing untold stories to light. The freedom to speak about the reality of suffering and death results in a freedom from denial.

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

The marvellous thing about learning from a story is that a story never ends, so our learning from it need not end either. p.98.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thinking about ethics back to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answ...

When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories...

I believe one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative. So I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with what I believe to be the first...

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....