James K. A. Smith has recently written "Singing the Story into Our Bones," a thought-provoking article on music. Here's a few excerpts from this article that stood out to me.

"We tend to think of stories as childish things—the stuff of children’s sermons. We romanticize stories, to be sure, and wax nostalgic about them, but we also think of “story” as something to outgrow, like security blankets and Santa Claus. Story is part of the immature, benighted world of myth and fantasy and nursery rhymes—the childish things we put away in order to grow up and face the proverbial “real world” full of cold, hard facts."

"As Christians inhabiting this late-modern world (still so powerfully shaped by the Enlightenment), we have imbibed and absorbed functional stances toward both story and authority that can make us poor hearers of Scripture. Even more problematic, our implicit perceptions of both story and authority might explain why, despite our best intentions, we have a hard time receiving the Bible as authoritative. It’s pretty hard for us to reconcile the flannelgraph depictions of fantastical stories about fish and fiery furnaces when Monday to Friday we’re faced with the urgency and force of the stock reports in The Wall Street Journal. We are unconsciously conditioned in a million different ways to defer to the authority of the facts in Scientific American and be skeptical of the gospel “stories” precisely because they are stories."

"To be human is to be storied."

"If Christian worship is one of the ways that we are sanctified by the Spirit, then we might say worship is a kind of narrative therapy—a reordering of our narrative orientation. Sanctifying our perception requires restor(y)ing the imagination. This transformation requires aesthetic measures that resonate with the imagination and reach us on an affective level. Stories are not just nice little entertainments to jazz up the material; stories are not just some supplementary way of making content “interesting.” No, we learn through stories because we know by stories."

"The formative power of cultural narratives cannot be adequately countered with mere didactics. Counterformation requires countermeasures that capture our imagination, not just convince our intellect. So we need to be regularly immersed in God’s story—“the true story of the whole world,” as Michael Goheen calls it. Our imaginations need to be restored, recalibrated, and realigned by an affective immersion in the story of how God in Christ is reconciling the world to himself. Song seeps into our bones in ways that didactic information never will. To sing the story of God’s gracious acts is not just to recite them. In the embodied, affective rhythm of song, the Spirit plants the story in the epicenter of our being: in our desire, in our imagination. Singing the story is the way it gets into our bones and under our skin, shaping the very way we perceive our world."