[William Kirk] Kirkpatrick shows how stories have always been the most important method of moral education.The Greeks, young and old, pored over Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and shaped their ideals and behavior according to the nobility of their heroes. The Angles and Saxons of ancient England passed down their moral heritage in epic poems such as Beowulf ... The Bible, above all, offers not only abstract doctrines, but stories. When we read or hear a story that stirs us, we want to play a part in that story.

Today, our society, having drifted away from words, has abandoned the use of stories in moral education in favor of "values clarification" sessions. School children gather around and discuss how they would handle impossible moral dilemmas (whom they would exclude from a fall-out shelter, for example.) What values clarification actually teaches is that morality is inherently problematic and only a matter of personal preference. Traditional stories (such as fairy tales, national legends, and most classic novels) present evil as repulsive, and goodness as alluring, a matter of objective law and heroic struggle. The values clarification view of morality is both a symptom and a cause of the moral chaos wrecking our culture. We need, says Kirkpatrick, "stories to live by."

Life is full and rich and complex like a story, not abstract and neat like a theory. The things that happen to us--the great joys, the intense sorrows, the surging passions--are too much like drama to be accounted for by anything less than drama.... What needs to be seen is that virtue in large part is also in the realm of the imagination.  Unless the moral imagination is hooked, the other moral faculties--will, emotion, and reason--are too often over-matched by fear, laziness, and self-interest. The great mistake of modern psychology lies in ignoring this obvious fact ... That is why I believe that our ancestors, both Christian and non-Christian, were the better psychologists. They knew that you must grasp the imagination, and they knew how to do it.

Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature, pp. 61-62