What is a Story?

Western thought began with an attack on religious myth by philosophers who held that the highest truth must be non-narrative and timeless. They left a paradox to haunt us: for on the one hand everyone knows that stories are important to us and our religion is full of them, while on the other hand stories continue to have a bad name as myths or fictions. It has been so difficult to say just how stories convey truth that until recently theologians were still trying to 'demythologize' religiou...