Our Faith is Situated

• From beginning to end, our faith is situated. It's an unfolding story, and every story requires a setting. It's news - and not just news that happened but news that's still happening, and that means it requires a context. It's an ongoing movement and message that always take place in a medium. It's all about incarnation - about God entering and embracing our story. So if you want to abandon the story, if you want to get out of time and culture and into some timeless neutral zone above the fray, you're trying to get out of the very thing God is deeply into.
  
  
• Learning isn't a consequence of teaching or listening, but a consequence of thinking.
  
  
• Chesterton used to say that tradition is the democracy of the dead. It reminds us not to be prejudiced against voices just because they're not here anymore.
  
  
• Nobody fully understands the realities depicted by models, even the people who use them. That's the purpose of a model. A model helps us work with a mystery.
  
  
• What an amazing thing prayer is, a kind of everyday miracle that we just take for granted, but to think that human souls can actually open to God and just wait, just wait to receive something, or just wait in quiet trust.

Yea for cozy times to read! The above quotes came from the first half of Brian McLaren's The Last Word and the Word After That. McLaren takes a narrative-based approach to theology which is very interesting to me because my entire professional teaching portfolio for this past year looked at a narrative-based approach to chemical education. I am finding that narrative is a very powerful tool for learning. No wonder Jesus told so many parables!