Nourishing Narratives - Print Book

Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith.

By Jennifer L. Holberg.

Soft cover, 240pp.
ISBN 9781514005248.
IVP Academic (2023).

[Allow 4 weeks].

Humans make sense of the world through language and the words that compose our stories. Holberg engages with writers like Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Flannery O'Connor, and Marilynne Robinson, to encourage us not only to understand how stories nourish our faith, but to discover how our stories are part of God's great story.

"Threading her own stories with rich reflection on biblical narratives and on the novels and poems she has taught and loved, Jennifer Holberg offers here a beautiful way of understanding what it means to live by stories. Nourishing Narratives is a rich celebration of cookbooks, dog walking, Dante, college life, embracing solitude, and living in communities bound together by shared stories that equip them to see one another through whatever life brings. Every page offers food for thought and thanksgiving."
Marilyn McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and When Poets Pray

"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