Upstream

In my discussion with Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, we explored the serious flaws in a recent survey that purported to show a “rebound” in Mainline Protestant denominations. The main problem? Well, this survey’s methods made it impossible to distinguish between those who have joined Mainline churches and those who have merely stopped using the terms “evangelical” and “born again” to describe themselves, but remain in conservative churches. This survey, in other words, doesn’t give us any reason to think the long-term trends in the American religious landscape have changed. And this matters because people keep suggesting that the only way to fill our pews is to compromise with modern ideas about sex and gender.

Writing in USA Today before the pandemic, Oliver Thomas made precisely this argument; in his words, “American churches must reject literalism and admit we got it wrong on gay people.” Thomas, whose bio says he’s on the board of contributors at USA Today and is a retired American Baptist Minister, seems to be confusing “literalism” with “inerrancy.” He offers no metaphorical interpretation of the New Testament’s condemnations of homosexual behavior that would render them true in a merely figurative sense. He just thinks they’re wrong, rooted in their authors’ ignorance and prejudice. He makes that abundantly clear.

But between taking potshots at the reliability of Scripture, trotting out the standard tropes about shellfish and menstruation in Leviticus, and listing all the times he thinks Christians have been on the wrong side of history, Thomas does manage to state his argument: “Churches will continue hemorrhaging members,” he writes, “until we face the truth: Being a faithful Christian does not mean accepting everything the Bible teaches.”

We endure this same editorial, with minor variations, every few months from CNN, The New York Times, or some other left-leaning publication. The thesis goes like this: The American church is shrinking, and Christians who won’t get on board with the new sexual orthodoxy are to blame. If the church wants to survive, it needs to modernize its teaching on sexuality and its reading of the Bible, setting aside old prejudices and affirming LGBT identities and lifestyles. As the late Rachel Held Evans wrote at CNN a few years ago, “What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance. We want an end to the culture wars...We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.” Only then, she warned, will churches be able to stem the cascade of younger adults from their exit doors.

Thomas treats the LGBT movement as a kind of new Pentecost: “A great revelation has occurred that is bringing joy and happiness to millions,” he writes, “but it is being met with resistance and retrenchment from many of my colleagues inside the church.” Pointing to statistics about the decline in religious affiliation overall in America, he makes a straightforward cause-and-effect argument that evangelicals and Catholics who won’t accept LGBT identities are at fault. This decline will continue, he laments, “until we muster the courage to face the truth: We got it wrong on gays and lesbians…This shouldn’t alarm or surprise us. We have learned some things that the ancients—including Moses and Paul—simply did not know.”

How to read statistics, evidently, is not among the things we’ve learned.

A recent Public Religion Research Institute survey claims to show that liberal Mainline denominations are rebounding from decades of membership decline. Shane welcomes Institute on Religion and Democracy president, Mark Tooley, to explain why the survey is flawed and why abandoning the fundamentals of Christian doctrine and ethics is a kiss of death for any denomination.

What’s the worse injury you’ve ever suffered? I’ve been pretty lucky. No major broken bones, concussions, or life-threatening loss of blood. But I have had some pretty nasty burns.

This happened back when I was seven years old. A friend and I had just been camping in my parents’ backyard. We’d built a fire and roasted marshmallows, and the flames had died down into a nondescript pile of ashes. My friend left the next day, and I was out wandering through the yard chasing grasshoppers. That was me at seven. One of them hopped or flew over the pile of ashes and I followed, assuming in my seven-year-old way that the pile would long since have cooled. It definitely had not.

I immediately sank several inches into the hot coals beneath the ashes. I was wearing sandals, so the embers poured in and got stuck. I ran inside screaming and my mother immediately ran cold bath water over my feet. But the damage was done. My toes, soles, and heels started to bubble up with angry blisters.

A few hours later, we were at the emergency room. The doctor explained that he would have to “debride” my blisters to prevent scarring and infection. I had no idea what that meant. My dad must have had some idea what was coming as the doctor instructed him to hold me down. The doctor then soaked a rag in hot water, grabbed an ankle, and began removing the blisters with quick twisting motions. And man, did I scream.

For at least a couple of weeks after that, I had to wear bandages on my feet and couldn’t do much walking. My parents pushed me around in a stroller and helped me clean my feet. They had to wrap gauze around each of my toes so they didn’t grow together and turn me into a duck, as they explained to me. Eventually, I healed, amazingly with no scars. And I can look back on that doctor with thankfulness for what he did, despite how much it hurt at the time.

This incident is still what I think of when I consider the body’s amazing ability to repair itself. In my conversation this week with pediatrician and author Jennie McLaurin, she described the body as a system that’s “designed” to heal. It’s fascinating to think about what that means: our bodies were created with the possibility of injuries already foreseen, and the power to weave cells, sinew, and bones back together already built-in. It wasn’t enough that God knit us together in our mothers’ wombs the first time; through the near-miraculous choreography of wound-healing, He knits us back together again and again throughout our lives.

It’s an awe-inspiring testimony to the power of life over death—one which recalls the story of life’s ultimate victory over death in Christ’s resurrection and which presages our own rebirth from the dead when He returns.

In some ways, all good stories—historical and fictional—are about wounding and healing. They’re about people who are called out of their ordinary lives by some destructive or evil force they must overcome that adversity to restore order. And just as our bodies often heal with stronger bones, skin, and muscles after an injury, the heroes who emerge out of their conflicts are often stronger in spirit and will for having overcome the forces of destruction that invaded their lives.

This immemorial plotline of life stubbornly undoing death—even in a world where it can seem death gets the last word—reminds me that suffering and healing aren’t experiences to which only the protagonists in novels and movies are called. They’re a cycle to which each of us is constantly summoned, and which we can either embrace with courage and gratitude, or reject with fear and bitterness. We are all responsible for becoming the healing hero of our own personal story, in the stories of our families, and in the stories of our communities. Each of us, upon experiencing a spiritual or relational wound, must choose whether it will overcome us and turn us into a force of destruction and death to those around us, or whether we will overcome it and be the instrument by which God knits the lives of everyone around us back together.

This can seem futile at times. Wounds are inevitable, and they always seem to recur. And no matter how doggedly we fight to maintain life and order, eventually we will wear out physically and mentally, and some other hero will have to take our place.

In much of pagan mythology, this endless cycle is the end of the story. The “corn kings” of the stories die and resurrect, the sun sets and rises, the spring disappears and returns. Evil and good, wounding and healing, order and chaos, death and life are equals, locked in an eternal struggle. But this is not how the Christian story ends.

In Jesus, the apparently interminable return of suffering and bloodshed reaches its terminus in a hero so good, who is wounded so severely, that He exhausts and overcomes suffering, itself. Christ’s mission was to “take up our infirmities,” to be “pierced for our transgressions,” and to become the sacrifice by whose “wounds we are healed.”

But if this is the case, it raises a difficult question: Why do we still suffer? If Christ received the ultimate wound and His suffering broke the cycle forever, why does Paul write that he and we must “fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ?” (Colossians 1:24) Writing at First Things a few years ago, theologian Peter Leithart offered a surprising answer:

“[Paul] didn’t believe that Jesus’s sufferings relieve him of the need to suffer. Jesus didn’t die so that we wouldn’t have to go through the messy inconvenience of dying ourselves. The opposite is true. Jesus died and rose so that we might share in his death and resurrection. The head suffered so that his body and each member could participate in his sufferings…Christ’s death is sufficient for all time, but time goes on, and until the end of time the Spirit will inscribe Christ’s one sufficient death into more

and more lives; the Spirit will keep dealing out shares in Christ’s sufferings. The Spirit will work his way into the flesh of countless future disciples to mold them into the shape of a cross. What is lacking in Christ’s afflictions is filled as believers suffer for Jesus and for his Church.”

According to Leithart, we suffer not because Christ’s sacrifice was insufficient, but because as Christ’s brothers and sisters, we reenact and participate in His suffering. We are each part of a continually-afflicted, wound-enduring, perpetually healing Body, a living corporate testimony of the stubborn power of life over death and of renewal over destruction.

Yet as the mystical Body of the resurrected Christ, we share not only in His redemptive suffering but in His resurrection. The power that raised Christ resides in each of His people, and that Spirit of life will have the final word in each our stories—not only over the suffering that recasts us in the image of our Savior, but over death itself, which has no power over those who have already died (Romans 6:8).

We can choose to be healing heroes in the here and now because there’s nothing futile about our efforts. Our very suffering and wounds take on new meaning, so that even the bodies whose blood, bruises, (and occasionally) burns remind us of our vulnerability will at last become invulnerable. Though I wonder if, like Jesus, a few of us might retain our scars to go with our stories.

Pediatrician and public health expert Jennie McLaurin joins Shane to discuss “Designed to Heal,” a book that explores the human body’s near-miraculous ability to recover from injuries, and how this applies to wounded cultures, communities, and individual hearts.  

Welcome to Upstream. I’m Shane Morris, and I want to reflect further on this week’s conversation.

We all remember the global shock and dismay on April 15, 2019 when one of the world’s most famous churches caught fire. Millions looked on helplessly as a large portion of Notre Dame cathedral, that architectural icon of Catholicism, focal point in literature, and symbol of France—went up in flames. While Paris took stock of the damage, we aired a BreakPoint commentary explaining why even many secular observers were horrified by the severe damage to the storied cathedral. Sacred spaces matter, said John, even to those who don’t believe in the sacred. A rash of church vandalisms worldwide in the weeks leading up to the blaze illustrated this. At the time, John remarked that, “Godless governments, racists, radical Islamists, and common arsonists” all seem to understand that such buildings matter, even if only as symbolic targets in their assault on Christianity.

It seemed everyone grasped the significance of sacred and beautiful spaces. Everyone, that is, except a certain group of vocal Christians online.

“…before the smoke had even cleared above Notre Dame,” said John, “well-meaning Christians took to social media to remind us that the church isn’t a building, it’s a people.”

This is of course true. It’s true in the same way that a family isn’t a house. But that doesn’t lessen the tragedy or sorrow for that family when their house burns down! Nor does it invalidate the way those who dwelt in that house came to identify it with their life together.

Why are so many evangelical Christians so quick to dismiss the importance and value of tangible beauty and creative expression, including sacred spaces? And why do we view so many of our church buildings as little more than functional facilities, building and decorating them in the image of shopping malls or corporate offices?

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called this phenomenon “disenchantment.” It was his way of describing how a sacramental view of reality that most Christians and indeed Westerners once took for granted has given way to a preference for function over form—for business over beauty—to a world in which the immanent does not point beyond itself to the transcendent.

Where once Christians routinely saw the physical world of art, architecture, music, bread, wine, and water as conduits or means of grace, many who are not explicitly associated with a High-Church tradition now see these things as ornamental at best and as distractions at worst. According to this view, the real conversion, worship, and grace occurs in the privacy of a person’s heart, moved by information received from the pulpit or perhaps by an ineffable impulse of the Spirit from within. In fact, I even meet Christians who question the sincerity and reality of spiritual devotion that isn’t individual, spontaneous, and purely internal.

Like all errors, this one contains a grain of truth. True worship really can happen in the confines of a person’s heart, in the absence of visible beauty, or in the midst of material poverty. As John notes, “The book of Acts describes a pretty amazing worship service once held in a Philippian jail.” And to this day, many of our persecuted Christian brothers throughout the world feel blessed even to gather with one another to worship and study Scripture in a home or hideout.

Yet for those of us who face no such hardships, it seems odd that visible beauty, art, and creative expression claim so little of our attention or energy—at least when it comes to worship. There are moments when nearly all of us revert to that older, sacramental view of the world—when beauty once again takes center-stage, and something besides internal, spontaneous states of mind matter.

As I told my colleague Brian Brown in this week’s conversation, my wife and I recently attended an evangelical wedding. The scene would be familiar to any of my listeners: groomsmen and bridesmaids, all arrayed in matching apparel formally processing to the altar. Parents and grandparents escorted to their seats. The bride made radiant and dressed in white—greeted by standing guests and accompanied by elegant music as her father led her into the presence of her beaming groom. Guided by a pastor, the two exchanged traditional vows and even added a very material ceremony with biblical origins: a foot-washing—the groom honoring his bride.

Once they had exchanged rings—another symbolic act—their pastor pronounced them man and wife, and they sealed his words with a kiss.

I brought up this scene with Brian because it illustrates the unspoken knowledge we all still have that beauty, material symbols, and the sacred still matter. It’s not as if this couple had no choice. It is possible today to marry with little or no ceremony. The justice of the peace is always available for civil proceedings, and some couples even choose to elope. Yet in the midst of all our informality and utilitarian thinking, little islands of the symbolic and sacred remain. Weddings are one place where our leftover sacramental instincts show up. Funerals are another. And at these events we betray the fact that despite our habit of treating the spiritual and physical realms as largely disjointed, we know that they can and must touch in key places.

I am an evangelical Protestant. I don’t use icons in my worship, nor do my family and I meet the members of our church under gothic architecture each Sunday (although our worship is traditional by modern standards, and I like to think our building looks okay). Yet I’ve come to the conviction that beauty expressed in ceremony, liturgy, art, sacred music, and most of all the sacraments is anything but optional. God created us embodied creatures who live in a material world, and Scripture makes it absolutely clear that He meets us in material ways.

From the monumental artistic project of Solomon’s temple to the complexity and skill of the Psalms, from Christ’s use of a meal and a bath to mediate supernatural grace to the gemstone-encrusted splendor of the New Jerusalem where it’s no coincidence the first order of business will be a wedding, the Bible speaks of a God who believes in and uses sacred acts and spaces—a God who, as C. S. Lewis says, really “likes matter,” and habitually arranges it in beautiful ways.

I hope you’ll listen to my conversation with Brian Brown, founder of the Anselm Society, this week on Upstream. We connected over our mutual appreciation for beauty and creative expression, and over our longing to see Christians reclaim these treasures. We also recognized that most Christians will only have the opportunity, resources, and expertise to invite beauty back into our lives in small ways. Yet if enough of God’s people value and cultivate beauty in our lives for long enough, we may just find ourselves in a world where more sacred spaces are being built than burned.

Colson Center Director of Programs and Anselm Society founder, Brian Brown, joins Shane to explore the central importance of beauty and imagination in the home, the church, and in our communities. Brian argues that the arts aren’t optional for Christians, since they move our hearts to worship and reveal things about God and His intent for creation that mere words cannot.  But beauty, he says, is accessible to all.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, the popular recasting of marriage as primarily a very close friendship. Young couples (frequently when posting photos of each other on social media) will say, “I married my best friend.” They intend this as a very high compliment to their spouse. Those who say it typically mean that their marriage is a continuation of a companionate relationship that already existed, and which transcended sexual attraction. Going to the altar with their “best friend” meant adding an additional layer to a relation that was already well-established, and was primarily Platonic.  

There’s something positive to be said for this attitude. I’ve known a number of couples over the years who genuinely did begin their association as friends. They enjoyed common interests, pursuits, or places of worship. They gravitated toward one another in conversation, because they found one another interesting. Only later, as they explain to me, did something else begin to develop.  

Frequently, attraction begins in one of them before the other. At some point, the fact becomes obvious, and since it’s never wise to leave such powerful forces dormant and unaddressed, the two have to make a decision: either to close off the possibility of a romance, or to embrace it. Couples who choose the latter (especially the men) often report a sense of epiphany. “I have been enjoying this woman’s presence and company for so long, the fact that she is an eligible mate escaped me.” Sometimes, this is because his friend is not what he would previously have described as his physical “type.” I’ve heard women say the same of their husbands. It could also be that one or both were so absorbed in other pursuits, including other romantic interests, that the friendship never had a chance to develop in a new direction. For C. S. Lewis, who took years to realize and admit his attraction to his future wife, Joy Davidman, it seems that romance simply wasn’t on his radar. Nevertheless, the literary friendship gave birth to something new and beautiful. It is not a bad thing to marry your best friend.  

It is bad, however, to treat friendship as the pinnacle or ideal of married love, or else to imply that marriages not based on very close friendship are somehow deficient. To suggest, even unintentionally, that marriage is or ought to be a kind of very intense friendship with the benefits of sex and family thrown in, is to seriously confuse the different words and concepts Scripture uses to describe love—or more precisely, loves. All four of them. 

Most marriages throughout history have not been based first and foremost on friendship. Many of history’s greatest marriages were based on economic, social, or even political necessity. The marriage of Mary to Joseph, arguably the most consequential union between two people ever established, was likely arranged by fathers. And nowhere in all the instructional passages about marriage in the New Testament do we find spouses commanded or encouraged to cultivate friendship.  

What we do find is a rapturous vision of partnership in dominion and glory—of man and woman together showing forth the image of God and embodying a sacred mystery at the heart of both creation and redemption. What we find inaugurated in Genesis, celebrated in Song of Solomon, confirmed and defended in the Gospels, sanctified in Paul, and fulfilled in Revelation is so much more than a companionate rooming arrangement. To describe marriage—eros as God intended it—as primarily a type of friendship is to cheapen both it and friendship love. To say I married my best friend may be true. But to leave it at that is to demote my spouse from her rightful and highest titles of bride and helpmeet.   

Our modern habit of making friendship the gold standard in marriage parallels other serious but popular confusions or conflations between types of love. Consider the opposite phenomenon, in which friendship is eroticized. I recently saw someone on Twitter repeat the tired and obnoxious claim that “The Lord of the Rings” has undertones of same-sex attraction. “[J. R. R.] Tolkien,” he claimed, “only wrote two kinds of dudes: beaming wife guys and yearning foxhole homosexuals.” A much wiser Twitter user replied by quoting C. S. Lewis’ book, “The Four Loves”: “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”  

In the book, Lewis continues the quotation, explaining something about the difference between friendship and romantic love, or “philia” and “eros,” to use the biblical Greek terms:  

“The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best.”  

Or consider the effort to rescue eros, itself, from mere animal physicality by redefining it as a sexual identity or orientation akin to “gay,” “lesbian,” or “bisexual.” Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, the 23-year-old daughter of New York’s governor, recently posted an interview to Instagram in which she described herself as “demisexual.” For those who aren’t familiar with this neologism, a Guardian columnist helpfully defines demisexuals as “people who aren’t sexually attracted to others unless they form a strong emotional bond with them first.”  

The same columnist rightly notes how unremarkable this so-called “orientation” is, and how Cuomo’s declaring it an esoteric sexual identity smacks of attention-seeking by an already rich and privileged young woman. Yet she goes on to observe how sexualized and lascivious our culture must be for anyone to feel the need to declare that emotions and relationship play some role in her sexuality. I would suggest that Cuomo’s need to reintroduce actual eros into the conversation about sex is yet another example of how we’ve confused and conflated the various types of love.  

Our culture, now more than ever, has no idea what “love” means. At times, it treats it as little more than a synonym for genital arousal. At other times, it offers a gnostic ideal in which all love—even the love between husband and wife—is nothing but an intense form of friendship between people who have decided to live and sleep together. We vacillate between Playboy and Hallmark, exalting animal lust at one moment and sentimental schmaltz the next. In the crossfire, concepts like real, disinterested friendship get slandered as repressed homosexuality, or else forgotten entirely. And the greatest of all loves—Agape—the Divine and spiritual charity that drove Christ to lay down His life for the Church and which God intended to vivify and sanctify the other loves—is nowhere to be found.  

Though Andrew Lazo and I disagreed about “Till We Have Faces,” C. S.’ Fictional attempt to portray the nature of love in the Christian story, we agree wholeheartedly on Lewis’ nonfiction version of the same concept in “The Four Loves.” Our conversation this week on Upstream serves as an invitation to explore the Oxford don’s grand vision of love, and to remember why rightly distinguishing between Storge, Eros, Philia, and Agape can repair the damage our culture has done to our understanding of each. But even more importantly, Lewis points us to the Scriptural well from which he drew his rich and satisfying knowledge of the loves, and to the Lover in whose relationship with His people we find all four perfectly, yet distinctly.  

Andrew Lazo tries to convince Shane that ‘Till We Have Faces’ is a misunderstood masterpiece that embodies the Oxford professor’s fully-mature thought on the nature of love.”

Welcome to Upstream. I’m Shane Morris, and I want to reflect further on this week’s conversation.

When I spoke with Andrew Peterson as part of our Wilberforce Weekend online, we tried to answer the question of what it looks like to serve God with our creative talents. Why has Christ equipped his body with so many members who write, compose, paint, draw, sculpt, sing, act, play, direct, and design? Why is the urge and ability to create so liberally scattered among the people of God? And what does He expect us to do with such capabilities?

The answer is complex, and much more than I can tackle in a short reflection. But in turning to a story—The Lord of the Rings—and a character—Samwie Gamgee—to illustrate one of his central points about humility and faithfulness, I think Andrew offered a profound insight on why the Church needs creativity, specifically creativity in the form of stories.

I once heard someone make the argument that we don’t need stories, and it went something like this: revelation and truth are offered to us directly in Scripture. We needn’t look elsewhere, much less seek tales of witches, dragons, and hobbits to learn and grow in our faith. Besides, these stories are fiction, which is just another word for a lie. They never happened, and therefore don’t teach us anything true in the sense of factual. Much better to go right to the source and study the Bible.

It sounds like a pious and scrupulous objection, until you realize that the Bible itself is packed with stories: the prodigal son, the wheat and the tares, the soils, the Pharisee and the tax collector, the pearl of great price, the ten virgins, the lost sheep, the unforgiving servant, the workers in the vineyard, the rich man and Lazarus, the sheep and the goats. When God Himself dwelt among us in the flesh, He spent more time telling stories than He did doing just about anything else.

The person with whom I had this conversation suggested that perhaps these weren’t fictional accounts. Perhaps they had really occurred. Without completely discounting that possibility, I think requiring them to be factual stories radically misses Jesus’ point in telling them.

When I spoke with Seraphim Hamilton, he suggested that one reason the Holy Spirit bequeathed to us a library of books measuring in at over 700 thousand words, rather than a set of bullet-pointed doctrinal propositions was to force us to diligently study His revelation. Had He given us the bullet points, we likely would have read them once and then assumed we grasped the faith. But no true wisdom or insight is gained that way. It is, as Seraphim said, gained through careful meditation and rumination—through chewing on the Word of God over a lifetime until it nourishes our souls and ultimately becomes a part of who we are.

Unless a biblical story specifically claims to be factual, there’s no need for that to be the case. The parables Jesus tells are almost certainly not history. But they were and are true. That is, they are vehicles of truth in a way that simple, propositional, didactic teaching could never be. That’s part of the reason why Jesus used them. And that’s part of the reason I am certain that He invites us to be storytellers, as well.

In one of Andrew’s most beautiful songs, “To All the Poets,” he sings this:

To all the poets I have known

You built a kingdom out of sea and sand

You conquered armies with a marching band

You carved a galaxy in stone

You built an altar out of bread

And spent your soul to see the children fed

You wove your heart in every story read

Thank God for poets I have known

…In every man you saw the boy

The hidden heart the dark could not destroy

Slipped past the dragons with a tale of joy

Thank God for poets I have known

That last line is taken from C. S. Lewis, who wrote that well-crafted stories can slip past the “watchful dragons” that guard the human imagination—those inhibitions that “paralyze” our apprehension of truth. What gives them this power? There are really two answers.

First, God approaches us not only through the true, but also in the good, and the beautiful. Moral and aesthetic revelation are essential to our full and incarnate humanity. They are the means by which God gives (and invites us to give) flesh, bones, and splendor to the foundational but abstract revelation we call truth. This is the most basic reason why we worship God in song and sacrament each Sunday, and not merely in hearing His Word preached.

Secondly and just as vitally, stories allow each of us to internalize and personalize truths that otherwise might seem distant and even irrelevant to our lives. As another Peterson—clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson—points out in his new book, “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” stories exercise power over us because they tap into collective and unconscious human knowledge and mimic the very form of our lives, which we experience in narrative form.

“In stories,” he writes, “we capture observations of the ideal personality. We tell tales about success and failure and adventure and romance. Across our narrative universes, success moves us forward to what is better, to the promised land. Failure dooms us, and those who become entangled with us, to the abyss. The good moves us upward and ahead, and evil drags us backward and down. Great stories are about characters in action, so they mirror

the unconscious structures and processes that help us translate the intransigent world of facts into the sustainable, functionable, reciprocal, social world of values.”

Andrew’s refrain throughout his own novels, which we’ve talked about at length on Upstream, is simple yet thrilling to young ears: “The stories are true.” He doesn’t, of course, mean that the world of Aerwiar is a place one could get to by boarding a ship or walking through a wardrobe (though as Lewis might remind us, one never quite knows). Andrew means that the stories he writes reflect in their beauty and goodness a truth we might otherwise miss, or fail to make our own.

These and other artistic portrayals of that truth not only invite, but give our hearts an opportunity to conform themselves to the contours of reality and of God’s own nature. By writing and reveling in them, we ourselves develop into the sorts of characters who are capable of confronting dragons—and more importantly, of living in an eternity where the chief Storyteller, Poet, and Creator meets us as goodness and beauty, as well as truth. Which leaves me, in my own way, thanking God for the poets I have known.

Shane visits with Andrew Peterson in a special Wilberforce Weekend discussion on art, imagination, and faith.