An Addendum to Yesterday's Article
Here's an important clarification...
First, thank you so much for the thoughtful questions and comments on my article, “How Morality Tales Might Undermine Your Kids’ Morality.” I realized after reading through them that there was a vital clarification I failed to make in yesterday’s piece. Several readers asked insightful questions about how Aesop’s Fables fit with my critiques since they are clearly moral stories with lessons. I believe Jesus’ parables belong in that same category. Another reader raised a great question about the difference between a short story and a “reductionist” story.
While I plan to explore these topics further in a future article, I wanted to quickly address this omission from yesterday’s piece. I didn’t mean to suggest that stories shouldn’t have morals or teach a lesson. I can see how that came across, but that’s not what I intended at all! On the contrary, I believe that every good story should have a moral lesson. The real issue isn’t whether a story has a moral but how that moral is conveyed.
I actually think Aesop’s Fables and Jesus’ parables do the exact opposite of what I was critiquing. Aesop’s Fables, for example, offer incredibly insightful, poignant, and often scathing portrayals of human behavior. They take complex truths about life and distill them into deceptively simple yet beautifully crafted tales. These fables are filled with satire, symbolism, and poetry, and they skillfully contrast wisdom and foolishness. I have no problem with the story's simplicity or their moral teachings. In fact, I think writing a short, simple story well is much harder than creating a long, complicated one. And that’s the crux of the matter — it has to be well done.
Imagine you’re at a five-star restaurant enjoying an incredible meal — the perfect blend of salt, fat, acid, and heat. Then, the chef comes out and lectures you on the nutritional content and carb count, suggesting you take a few laps to work it off.
There are two issues here. First, even if everything the chef says is valuable, the problem is when we start thinking that the conversation about the meal is more important than the meal itself, or worse, that the conversation actually is the meal. Eating the food and talking about it are two widely different activities. When you’re eating, you’re usually just enjoying it, often unaware of how it’s nourishing your body—and that matters both with food and stories.
But when we do this with stories, especially for children, it can kill their love for the tale. If kids start to think that the story is just a “preachy” lesson, it shuts down their imagination. It tells them to stop engaging. I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about stories as we read them; of course, we should! But again, it’s all about HOW we do it.
This leads to my second issue with this kind of reductionism. There’s often a modern arrogance in our pragmatism, as if we understand the psychology of children better than centuries of wisdom, effectively dismissing the true value of stories. A purely pragmatic worldview denies the importance of storytelling, symbolism, magic, archetypes, and more. It starts with a practical goal and then tells bad stories simply to serve an external agenda — like a chef whose sole goal is to make a meal with only 50 calories, sacrificing the integrity and balance of flavors for this narrow objective.
For example, as I mentioned in my article, I’ve seen Bible stories like the story of Daniel, or plenty of others, reduced in retellings where the story is poorly told, and it almost seems like the entire reason for the story was to teach modern kids to resist peer pressure. It’s as if the story is there to serve our agenda, rather than us offering ourselves wholly to the agenda of the scripture.
I hope this clarifies my point a bit more, but please feel free to share more questions or comments. This is a tough topic to articulate, which is why I plan to devote more articles to it. Again, thank you so much to everyone who shared their thoughts — engaging with readers like you adds so much joy to what I’m doing!
Looking forward to more great discussions!
Hey Noelle, how much of this do you think is an issue of storytellers telling and not showing?
Noelle - it strikes me that Jesus' parables would not satisfy readers who demand that every story have a clear, straightforward moral lesson. His own disciples hard a difficult time understanding the meaning behind them. Moreover, he openly admitted that his stories were told with the express purpose of confusing some of his hearers.
And that's to say nothing about the layers of meaning each story has, much like your example of the story of Daniel. There's nothing wrong with observing that Daniel resisted peer pressure. But if we walk away from the text with that as our sole or primary takeaway, we've done ourselves a disservice as readers.
Which is all to say: you're on to something good and wonderful. Keep it up! I'm looking forward to those future articles.