Comments in The New Yorker

The Mail

Letters respond to Parul Sehgal’s essay about narrative.

What’s the Story?

Parul Sehgal’s essay about the predominance of “storytelling” in contemporary culture reminded me of what happened to Christianity when narrative theology began to spread through American churches in the nineteen-seventies (A Critic at Large, July 10th & 17th). To congregations that had grown tired of doctrinal and moral pronouncements, the new style—which recast the sermon as a story with which the listener could readily identify—came as a breath of fresh air. After all, the Gospel is nothing if not a narrative, and the Hebrew Pentateuch is one good story after another. As a teacher of preaching at Duke Divinity School, I felt that the notion of story could not encompass everything of God and revelation; nor are the Biblical stories “artless” or self-evident to all. As we observed the movement in action, many of my colleagues and I concluded that the complex, often double-edged narratives in Scripture resist tidy stories. We discovered something akin to what Sehgal arrives at in her analysis: that we need the non-narrative language of instruction, exaltation, declarations, and questions to keep a story honest.

Richard Lischer
Durham, N.C.

Published in the print edition of the August 7, 2023, issue.