Alister E. McGrath - Narrative Apologetics: Sharing the Relevance, Joy, and Wonder of the Christian Faith

Chapter 1 Introducing Narrative Apologetics

. Ursula K. Le Guin, Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: Berkley, 1982), 22.

. For the accessibility and imaginative stimulus of the Gospel narratives for children, see Melody R. Briggs, How Children Read Biblical Narrative: An Investigation of Childrens Readings of the Gospel of Luke (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017).

. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago, 2005), 203.

. See, for example, Margaret R. Somers, The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach, Theory and Society 23 (1994): 60549; Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Narrating the Self, Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 1943; Crystal L. Park, Religion as a Meaning-Making Framework in Coping with Life Stress, Journal of Social Issues 61, no. 4 (2005): 70729; Joshua A. Hicks and Laura A. King, Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture: Positive Affect and Global Focus, Cognition and Emotion 21, no. 7 (2007): 157784; Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). My focus in this book is on the narrative quality of human experience and existence, rather than on narrative as a literary genre .

. Edmund Arens, Wer kann die groen Taten des Herrn erzhlen? (Ps 106, 2): Die Erzhlstruktur christlichen Glaubens in systematischer Perspektive, in Erzhlter Glaube Erzhlende Kirche , ed. Rolf Zerfass, 1327 (Freiburg: Herder, 1988); my translation.

. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Childrens Literature (New York: Garland, 1998), 323.

. Stephen Crites, The Narrative Quality of Experience, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39, no. 3 (1971): 291311; Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, eds., Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

. Jeffry R. Halverson, H. L. Goodall, and Steven R. Corman, What Is a Master Narrative?, in Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism , 1126 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

. For this phrase, see Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 14774.

. Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel , 2nd ed. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2002), 6162.

. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23.