I really enjoyed "Rediscovering the Wisdom in American History," a great essay by Wilfred McClay, in a recent issue of Imprimis.

I found some of Ross Douthat's comments in an interview with Tyler Cowen (via Rod Dreher) very thought-provoking, especially his comments that we are living out today the story that will become "the epic of heaven"--"the story that will be told in the streets":

I think that you could make the argument that narrativity is the way in which God has revealed himself in the world from a Christian perspective, from a Judeo-Christian perspective. You know the Old and New Testaments contain a lot of theologizing, but they are, above all, narratives. They are stories of a chosen people. They are travails and betrayals and wars, and miseries, and judgments, and all the rest. And then there’s a story in the New Testament that is, as the cliché goes, the greatest story ever told .. . . 

But I think to the extent that I would defend my own instincts and my own approach — sometimes I say this to my children when I’m clumsily trying to indoctrinate them in my faith; I say “you are living inside a story, and God is the storyteller.” And again, this is not a thought original to me at all, but God is the storyteller and you are an actor within that story. And the difference is that in this story, God, Christians would say, God himself enters the story: he becomes a character in the play, which is a very difficult thing for a playwright to normally do.

But that story, the fact that God is a storyteller, tells us something reasonable about how best to approach him and that it is not just OK, but completely plausible to approach him through narrative, through poetry, through art, through stories, and so on. And there is a sense — I think this idea I’m stealing from Alan Jacobs, who wrote a biography of C. S. Lewis — but I think there’s a real sense in which — and maybe this speaks to the failure of Western theology over the last 50 years — but Christians in the West, in the United States — well-educated, would-be intellectual Christians — tend to be heavily influenced by storytellers, heavily influenced by Lewis, heavily influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien, heavily influenced even by Dorothy Sayers and her detective stories, heavily influenced by Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.

I think it’s probably fair to say that Chesterton’s Father Brown stories had as much influence on my worldview as his more sort of polemical and argumentative writings. And, again, I think therein lies some important insight that I haven’t thought through, but I think you’re correctly gesturing at, about a particular way of thinking about God and theology that isn’t unique to Christianity, but that is strongly suggested by just the structure of the revelation that we have. Marilynne Robinson has a line, I think in Gilead, about — one of the characters is imagining that this life is like the epic of heaven. That we’re living in the Iliad or the Odyssey of heaven. This is the story that will be told in the streets.

And I think that’s a very powerful and resonant and interesting way of thinking about our lives, but thinking about the Christian view of history that we’re living inside a very, very interesting story that people will be talking about in heaven for a long time.

In his essay "Myth: Flight to Reality," Thomas Howard shows that we do almost everything we do out of a deep-down desire for what he calls "perfection." We want to make this world what it ought to be.

It's amazing to me in this passage how closely this desire aligns with the Christian view of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. There's something deep down in all of us, including non-believers, that understands that this world is damaged and in need of redemption, and we do what we do out of a desire for that redemption. In this passage, Howard shows that this desire drives everything we do, from politics to healthcare to law, and even to the creation of stories.

The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think, the search for perfection. Now you can give this perfection a hundred names--truth, beauty, goodness, wholeness, bliss, repose, order, form, the eternal, and so on, depending on what you want to stress at the moment. There's no word in human language that will name it adequately. Let's call it perfection here. We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It is what stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire. We find sooner or later all the data of our experience will be faulted--our bodies, our minds, our wills, our relationships, our landscapes, our states, our institutions, our programs.

Politics, medicine, ecology, and [law] are our efforts to repair the damage. Most of what we do, starting with brushing our teeth in the morning, would be seen by the angels as a waste of time, since they don't know what it is to be almost wholly occupied with shoring things up. When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy we feel between ourselves and perfection. We want tranquility and we find tumult. We want permanence and we find decay. We want order and we find havoc. We want health and we find sickness. We want strength and we find weakness. We want beauty and we find horror.

But neither can we settle for this state of affairs. We are driven by who knows what--maybe it's the Holy Ghost--to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, to transcend it. We write about our experience, and we sing about it, and we reenact it because we think that somehow if we can stand off from it and get a look at it, we can get ahold of it once more. We signal our awareness of perfection by making something approximating perfection out of our experience--something true, beautiful, good, and incorruptible.

Nobody really remembers easy stories [where characters do not face much conflict. But in good stories,] characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That's what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death. . . . These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world. 

I was watching the news the other night, and they were still covering that story in Mumbai about the terrorists who went on a shooting rampage. . . . I kept imagining [the victims], just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

Don Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, pp. 31-32

From Daniel Taylor's essay "In Praise of Stories" (emphasis mine): 

We are drawn to stories because our own life is a story and we are looking for help. Stories give us help in many ways. They tell us we are not alone, and that what has happened to us has happened first to others and that they made it through. They also help us see, however, that our own story is not big enough, that the world is larger and more varied than our limited experience. They help us be more fully human by stimulating and appealing to all that we are--mind, body, spirit. They help us by calling us into relationship--with other people, with other places and times, with creation, and with God. They help us by giving us courage to be the kinds of characters we should be in our own stories, and by making us laugh, empathize, and exercise judgment. But most of all, stories help us by telling the truth, without which we cannot live. 

. . .

Stories are not optional for human beings. It is not the case that some people like stories and seek them out, and other people do not. ... We are all, without exception, drawn to stories, and it may have to do with the way the brain works. As our experience presents itself to us, the brain organizes the stream of perceptions in story form--making connections between things, seeking out a plot, searching for meaning and coherence, trying to decipher what actions and responses are required. As a result, we are as instinctively drawn to story as to water and food. The attraction requires no education or training or special inclination. 

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us  who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

 . . . 

A story must, literally, be for our good, though good must be understood in the widest possible way. Stories don't necessarily make you a nicer or more ethical person--though many can; they draw out of you more of what makes you a feeling, giving, thinking, creating, laughing, curious human being. Not every story must improve us--stories are valuable on other scores--but we should be different and better because of the cumulative effect of the stories in our lives.

 . . . 

The stories we choose for ourselves define who we are. Every story defines a community--at least the community of two, teller and listener, at the most the community of humanity. A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces. 

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."

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just a condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ” Donald Miller, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years