storytelling on Masculinity

**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 ...

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

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...

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 ...

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...

God made Man because He loves stories.

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.

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...

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.

The Master & His Workshop I remember first walking into my friend Andrew’s new workshop, housed in a colonial-style barn and situated on an expansive wooded acreage on the Eastern Seaboard. Thin...

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 ...

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

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...

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours... it is precisely through ...

It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...

The sermon is no place for a virtuoso performance; it is a place for believers to explore together their common experience before God. The stories I tell from the pulpit are not just “my” stories but ...

I met a man who watches The Lord of the Rings movies every night. When he told me this I pushed back: “Every night?” He said that when he gets off work he goes home, fixes his dinner, turns on the m...

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 ...

John Fiske, a Harvard scholar, once visited Herbert Spencer, regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of his time in England. During their conversation, Spencer asked about Mrs. Fiske and the chil...

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.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

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

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

If Hollywood decided to make a movie about your life, what would it look like? What genre would it be? Action/Adventure? Drama? Comedy? Who would play you? Tom Cruise? Denzel Washington? For most of u...

Anyone who tells a story speaks a world into being.

Most of life is autobiographical for all of us—and so it was for [C. S.] Lewis. Growing out of his years of sorrow, especially the ones of watching his mother become sick and die, The Magician’s Neph...

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...

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...

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 ...