Welcome to Stage & Story

Welcome to Stage & Story

Welcome to Stage & Story (and to our eponymous Stage & Story Blog)! My prayer for this blog is to provide a place to think deeply about the intersection of God’s creative work and his image-bearers. This takes place through the imagination, something I see as terribly important and frightfully overlooked in places of learning.

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I remember the first time I read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Or, I should say attempted to read it. I was a teenager, and my assignment was to write a detailed outline of the book; my only hope was to make sense of it. I finished the outline, but in my soul, I knew I was only kidding myself: I had no inkling of what he was saying. Thankfully, my story doesn’t end here: I did finally grasp what Lewis was arguing, and it only took hours of discussion with my classmates and a number of re-reads.

The year I read Lewis was a mixture of joy, wonder, and pain. Now (though not then), I can say joy and wonder won the match, mainly because the pain of having to focus for hours and read and re-read sections left a while ago. My friends, joy and wonder, are still with me. In Narnian fashion, they keep opening their doors to new lands, full of new insights. You see, Lewis introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams and Sheldon Vanauken and then Dorothy Sayers.

Dorothy Sayers’ book The Mind of the Maker has greatly influenced my thinking, casting me headfirst into the delight of knowing God as Creator, Storyteller, Dramatist, and Director.

Janine Langan writes in The Christian Imagination that “there is nothing more fundamental than the imagination, and that our loss of respect for it is directly linked to religious apathy” (63). It’s not that we don’t use our imaginations, that’s impossible, but that so often our imaginations’ chief educators are the marketing managers and Hollywood screenwriters, bent on teaching us that joy and delight are found only in the fleeting pleasures of this world, producing a secular imagination.

The Christian imagination provides far better insights. Certainly it sees the goodness and beauty of God’s creation, but it also understands the reality of its curse, and that hope is found only in Christ as captured in God’s magnificent Drama.

My hope for this blog then is to offer opportunities to cultivate our imaginations to see the world in a Christian manner, looking at literature, film, and theology as image-bearers of the Dramatist-Director.

Our first entries will be a series (“The Stories We Tell”) on the different types of stories humans weave and how Christians can utilize each of them and see new glimpses of God’s Drama.