stories on Paths

For many of us, life can easily become disorienting and discouraging. Existential questions often emerge that never have before. As stressful as modern life can be, it is somewhat comforting to know t...

“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose its often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: a...

Our Scriptures that bring us the story of our salvation ground us in place. Everywhere they insist on this grounding. Everything that is critically important to us takes place on the ground. Mountains...

We make our home by stories.

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 ...

When I was fifteen, I applied for my first job, at Eureka Baking Company, and ran into a complication. The job interview was a few miles from my high school, and I didn’t have a way to get there. I su...

The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is no...

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in response to a story.

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...

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Several years ago I was conducting a seminar in the interpretation of Scripture in a theological seminary…Our topic that day was Jesus’ parables…One of the priests, Tony Byrnne, was a Jesuit missionar...

Robert C. McFarlane was a well-known businessman in the Los Angeles area. He had moved to California from Oklahoma in 1970, and within just a few days of his arrival—due to a disastrous misunderstandi...

Stories are about the vicissitudes of human intention. Trouble is what drives the drama.

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...

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.

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...

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...

A man named Jack was driving on a dark country road one night when he got a flat tire. He saw a cabin in the woods and began to walk towards it. He told himself that the person who answered the door w...

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 ...

The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story.

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...

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

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 ...

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...

A Story is life with the dull parts taken out.

An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.

What often continues to shape our stories (interpretations) are the implicit emotional responses to our wounds. We must be willing to attend to our wounds and address the emotions embedded in our woun...

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...

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

300 10-Minute Devotions For the past six years I’ve been a volunteer chaplain at Haywood Pathways Center , a Christian residential program for people working to turn their lives around from addict...