Welcome to the storying life podcast! Storying Life is a blog/podcast exploring the significance of stories, culture, and community. We range through philosophy, geek culture, pop culture, Christian culture, critical theory, politics, history, and more, searching for and engaging stories.
Over the past couple years the two of us, David Barrett and Dale McCreery, have been involved in the process of cooking good food, eating it, and then hashing through why we and others see and approach the world in various ways. At some point we committed to broadening the conversation with others via the writing of a book, and then settled on podcasting as an intermediate step to wider engagement. To that end, we created this website - first to host our podcasts, and second to provide a forum for discussion (though we also crosspost all podcasts to our facebook group).
Our recommended introductory podcasts to the concepts in this series are first The Story Made for Man - a look at the question of what a healthy relationship to a story is, and Lines, How We Travel, How We Live - looking at how the way we describe movement changes how we view life. The third podcast in this series is If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do - a discussion of what we might consider to be our most important story connecting our ideas together.
Expanding from this base, The Truth About Stories part 1 - introduces why stories are important to how we live and love. Then part 2 - introduces how stories can grab us with the power of meaning, and with the idea of how narrative power is invoked in scripture.
This idea of stories grabbing us leads into the question of how we engage with stories, a concept central to the ideas explored in David's exploration of wilderness survival non-fiction, Freedom as Responsibility (part 1 and part 2). This question of the reasoning behind choosing a specific means of engagement is developed further in God as Other, an exploration of why God reveals himself as he does, with implications for how we approach scripture, explored in Reading the Bible as Non-Fiction (part 1 and part 2).
The question of what a positive, practical application of these concepts might look like is explored in Daily Transformations with guest Donnie Sands, and continued into a round-table discussion on the topic in which a range of contributors talk about their own personal applications (here).
Finally, there are podcasts that draw on all of these ideas, and apply the approach in specific situations, the most significant to date being Steve Mirkovitch's discussion of Open Theism, but also including a two part discussion of the ideas of security and violence in wake of the Boston bombings (part 1 and part 2).
Please feel free to engage in the conversations started here!
