Nourishing Narratives
The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: IVP Academic (InterVarsity Press)
- Published: 2023
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Publisher's Description
Humans are story-shaped creatures. We make sense of our world, pattern our lives, and reflect on what is ultimately significant through language and the words that compose our stories. But how does this relate to the narrative of the Bible and the story that God is writing through history? In Nourishing Narratives, writer and professor Jennifer Holberg engages with words from the likes of Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Flannery O'Connor, Marilynne Robinson, and more while also offering some of her own stories to reflect on the importance of story to our lives and our faith. Here, readers are encouraged not only to understand how stories nourish our faith, but to discover how our stories are partof God's great story.
Endorsements (4)
“Wise, observant, and compassionate, Jennifer Holberg's Nourishing Narratives is a beautiful book that celebrates the readerly life of stories, novels, and poetry. With warmth and honesty, Holberg brings the worlds of writers from George Eliot to Dante into the trials of daily life. She inspires us to hold on to a 'vision of a light-filled world, full of sometimes difficult things,' as she puts it so well. I shall cherish this book.”
“Pull up a chair and let this master storyteller gently question and correct the destructive stories we often rely on to make sense of our lives. In an age marked by narratives of stress-inducing scarcity and individual achievement, Jennifer Holberg invites us to instead live out truer narratives of abundant friendship and restorative hope. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written, if we want to rightly answer the question, What am I to do? we must first answer the question, Of what story or stories do I find myself a part? Holberg is a wise guide to the faithful, life-giving stories that Christians are called to inhabit.”
“Threading her own stories with rich reflection on biblical narratives and on the novels and poems she has taught and loved, Jennifer Holberg offers here a beautiful way of understanding what it means to live by stories. Nourishing Narratives is a rich celebration of cookbooks, dog walking, Dante, college life, embracing solitude, and living in communities bound together by shared stories that equip them to see one another through whatever life brings. Every page offers food for thought and thanksgiving.”
“Funny and approachable, erudite and smart, this book is not merely a celebration of literature—it is an invitation to learn how to read as if our faith lives depend on it. Jennifer Holberg shows us why we love stories and, more importantly, why we need them.”
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