On Stories
Literary Analysis and Philosophical Musings
The Purpose of Stories: To Entertain or To Teach?
This past week, I’ve immersed myself in developmental editing for my novel-in-progress, Age of Prophets—and since the double-spaced printed manuscript is 460-some pages, disappeared might be a more accurate verb than immersed. Among other recurring editorial issues,...
The Case for Reading Fairy Tales
I’m a few weeks shy of twenty years old, and this is the first Valentine’s Day of my life that I haven’t been single. Most of those Valentine’s Days, I was perfectly content exchanging homemade valentines with my friends, but I won’t lie—those last several Valentine’s...
An Eager Air: In Defense of Metaphor
This past week, I spent not one but two rather lengthy layovers in the Denver airport. Being the industrious person that I am, I decided to begin reading Hamlet (mostly in preparation for a college essay comparing the views of justice in Hamlet and the Oresteia, but...
Defining Literature: Literal Analysis (pt 2 of 5)
What is literature? In the first blog post of this series, I offered the following definition of literature: “A book is literature if it invites readers to engage with it using the four levels of Biblical interpretation (literal, typological, moral, anagogical) in a...
Defining Literature: Introduction (pt 1 of 5)
What is literature? Does a book have to be old to be literature? What about literary fiction—is that literature? If all literary fiction is literature, does that mean no genre fiction (i.e. a fantasy novel or murder mystery) is literature? What if you think a book is...
Controlling the Fable-Makers: Plato’s “Republic” and the Role of Stories in Moral Education
Battle Between King Arthur and Sir Mordred, William Hatherell (1850)Being the overachiever that I am, I somehow ended up with 20 college credits and two part-time jobs for Fall 2025, and in an effort to lighten my reading load this fall (about 400 pages a week, if I’m...