Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith

by Jennifer L. Holberg

Publisher:

IVP Academic

, 2023

Overview

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 part of God's great story.

Key Features

• Explores how our stories are part of God’s great story
• Offers some of her own stories to reflect on the importance of story to our lives and our faith
• Engages with words from the likes of Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Flannery O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, and more

Contents

• Complicated Narratives and Important Failures
• Enough
• Graced with the Ordinary
• Assessing the Hill
• A Witness Ready to Serve
• Our Little Systems
• Small Steps at Very Great Cost
• Root-Room
• Our Hope for Years to Come

Praise for the Print Edition

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.

—Jeffrey Bilbro, associate professor of English at Grove City College and author of Reading the Times

Not only is Jennifer Holberg a clear, compelling, and beautiful writer, but her words in Nourishing Narratives are also filled with truth and goodness. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that made my heart sing along as this one did. Nourishing Narratives will open your eyes, grow your faith, and feed your soul.

—Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

Product Details

• Title: Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith
• Author: Jennifer L. Holberg
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2023
• Pages: 240
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Resource ID: LLS:NRSHNGNRRTVSFTH
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2023-01-06T16:23:19Z

About Jennifer L. Holberg

Jennifer L. Holberg (PhD, University of Washington) is professor and chair of the English department at Calvin University and codirector of the Calvin Center for Faith and Writing, the home of the Festival of Faith and Writing. She is a founding coeditor of the academic journal Pedagogy and also the editor of Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak About Their Writing and Their Faith.