storytelling on Language

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

**Spoiler Alert:**This review contains some minor spoilers about the plot of Ted Lasso . Content Alert: Ted Lasso contains adult themes, sexual content, and strong language. I’ve read at least ...

Story is the primary way in which the revelation of God is given to us. The Holy Spirit’s literary genre of choice is story. Story isn’t a simple or naive form of speech from which we graduate to the ...

Anyone who tells a story speaks a world into being.

Have you ever heard the expression, "words create worlds?" It's been attributed to various people, but what's most important is just how true it is. I think I first grasped this in c...

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.

Richard Mouw, the former president of Fuller Seminary and a professor of philosophy, shares an amusing anecdote from a lecture by the esteemed Catholic ethicist Charles Curran. During his talk, Curran...

Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.

We make our home by stories.

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.

What we . . . refer to confidently as memory . . . is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

A Special Kind of Story Most Christians have some idea of what a parable is. Ask an adult Sunday school class and you might hear: “It’s a story!” Another might chime in, “with a moral message!” Mer...

The key to interpreting most allegories [i.e., parables] lies in recognizing what a small handful of characters, actions or symbols correspond to and then fitting the rest of the story in with them.

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

The first rule of telling stories is to give the audience—whether it's one business person or a theater full of moviegoers—an emotional experience. The heart is always the first target in telling ...

Joining the Story “We read to know that we are not alone” (Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands ). That’s also why we listen to sermons. Someone once told me that in every sermon they hope ...

What is Liturgy? I know that not all of us come from so-called “liturgical” traditions, but all of us do use a liturgy of sorts. Liturgy is a compound Greek word meaning “public work” that is associa...

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today ...

Stories, it turns out, are not optional. They are essential. Our need for them reflects the very nature of perceptual experience, and storytelling is embedded in the brain itself.

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

A name is a seed. When it germinates it becomes a story.

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian son...

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...

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

Personal storytelling—the kind that reveals who we are and what we care about—is the most potent and effective way to connect with the world around us.

In his book  Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...

Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.

There’s no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

When my daughter Hope was little, I told her a bedtime story every night. I read her the usual books— Goodnight Moon and Winnie-the-Pooh —but her favorite stories were the “made-up ones.” Th...