bible+culture 2015: media 1. the stories we tell

Engaging with Media

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The most important thing about the communications we live among is . . . that with all their lives, skews, and shallow pleasures, they saturate our way of life with a promise of feeling.

Todd Gitlin Media Unlimited (2002)

No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’

Abraham Kuyper

The Stories We Tell

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

Ingmar Bergman

Why Stories Matter

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world

Philip Pullman

Stories – individual stories, family stories, national stories – are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Yann Martel Beatrice and Virgil

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. . . .

© Metsavend, used under aCreative Commons licence

. . . Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation. Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

Ben Okri

© Metsavend, used under aCreative Commons licence

What are some of the prominent stories in British society at the moment?

What impact do you think they are having on the health of our society?

Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart.

Stephen Lawhead Merlin

All stories teach, whether the story-teller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

Philip Pullman

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Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have some-thing to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.

Madeleine L’Engle

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Our action emerges from how we imagine the world. What we do is driven by who we are, by the kind of person we have become. And that shaping of our character is, to a great extent, the effect of stories that have captivated us, that have sunk into our bones-stories that ‘picture’ what we think life is about, what constitutes ‘the good life.’ . . .

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. . . We live into the stories we've absorbed; we become characters in the drama that has captivated us.

James K.A. Smith Imagining the Kingdom

Seven Major Themes

1. Paradise Lost

2. Breaking Free

3. Remaking the World

4. Defeating Oppressors

5. Overcoming Brokenness

6. Finding True Love

7. Coming Home

In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all read, the movies we have almost all seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. . . .

The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.

Frederick Buechner

Stories can change the world.

N.T. Wright

© Jordan Cooper, used under a C

reative Com

mons licence

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