Engaged Spirituality: Stories of Resilience, Inspiration, and Pursuit of the Common Good
In 1979, Californian Joan Didion published a collection of essays that typified what was called the “New Journalism” — a style of newswriting more reminiscent of longform non-fiction than traditional reporting. Still fact-based, but interpolated with subjectivity and immersive imagery, Didion’s writing not only featured powerful stories about Black Panther party meetings, experiments with entheogens, and recording sessions with The Doors in 1960s Los Angeles, but her own psychological journey as a journalist. More than information or exposition, Didion’s stories were just that: narrative accounts that took the reader somewhere, rather than just telling them something. In the opening sentence of the essay “The White Album,” Didion underscored why readers found her stories so unputdownable and why, in turn, she felt compelled to write them. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote, “we interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line…to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
The “imposition of narrative,” Didion writes, is like a sacred canopy, holding the anomy and chaos at bay, projecting meaning onto the incomprehensible universe, and encouraging us to hope things will work out just fine – even, or especially, if we are not sure they will.
With these words, Didion hit on what this book is all about: a good story. At its heart, this book is a testimony to the power of telling good stories. But with an unexpected twist. Or you might say, a surprise ending: That telling good religion stories advances vital conversations around some of the most critical issues of our time. In the crux of the late-modern, beset as it is with humanitarian crises and internecine conflict, polarized politics and the retreat of democracy, hate speech and misinformation, environmental degradation and deadly global diseases, economic disparity and debates around gender, cultural identity and education, we need good religion stories. In a world so often divided, torn apart by what seems insurmountable tensions, religion stories told across traditions remind us to break through our own narratives, or those of “our people,” and listen for a while to the story of humanity as a whole. Those kinds of stories not only connect us, they help us rediscover who “we” are in the process. Narratives, especially in the hands of quality storytellers, provide both a degree of significance to individual lives and a through-line of truth for our shared existence. They also preserve the memory of deeds across time, enabling the actions of others to become sources of inspiration for the “gap between past and future,” as German American historian Hannah Arendt put it – that is, models to be imitated, and, if possible, surpassed.
This open access book is a testimony to the power of telling good stories, revealing that the sharing of good religious stories helps advance vital conversations around some of the most critical issues of our time.
Drawing on profiles of spiritually engaged humanitarians written by reporters it not only prompts us to better understand global religion and its entanglement with issues of worldwide concern (e.g., inequality, conflict, and climate change), but better imagine the many “tomorrows” religious actors are actively trying to create across the world.
Related content:
[Commentary] Ken Chitwood, “Telling Good Religion Stories,” Patheos.