Gain Discernment through Stories…

Our times have been dubbed the “information age,” as if our lives can be summed up by random facts about gas prices, car insurance quotes, and Ticktock videos. 

But we think in stories… We live, dream, feed on, read, and watch stories.

We are also vulnerable to stories, whether they come from inside our own minds, or the passing credit union billboard. Most of modern education has collapsed into propaganda in the form of competing narratives. 

Stories shape who we are and who we are becoming…

Good stories frame the world for us, teach us how to live in our own stories, how to recognize big and small villains, how to find truth, goodness, and beauty. But only if we understand them. 

The purpose of this blog is to highlight great stories—from the past and the present—understand, and apply them (note, this is not a bookclub or book review site).

Why Subscribe?

Many people are discovering that we live in academically impoverished times. Many of us hunger for more but don’t know how to recapture the classical wisdom that has been lost. 

If you want help rediscovering classic stories, if you don’t know where to start, or think you don’t have the time, I would love to help as I learn with you. I promise two things in each article: First, to expound excellent stories in an understandable (not snobby) way, even if you have never heard of them. Second, to leave you with a practical takeaway. 

Why box Hill?

Emma, the main charter in one of Austen’s novels spent her entire life telling herself small-minded, petty stories about the world and people around her—and she even believed them. 

Then she visited Box Hill. Here, she was forced to encounter an ugliness in her own heart, even as, for the first time ever, she saw enlarged views of the surrounding country. She confronted a bigger story that forever changed her. 

Confusing and false narratives leave us confused, self-preoccupied, stuck at the bottom of the hill. In this newsletter, I want to learn how to discern the bigger story that God is telling and reach a deeper perspective through biblical and classical storytelling. 

It’s a death of the old and birth of the new—it’s a hill worth dying on.