On this episode of the Symbolic World podcast, I'm playing for you a talk that I gave at the

Klemachus conference in Kentucky in 2017. And in this talk, which is the first part of a two-part

discussion, in this talk entitled Encountering God in Stories, I look at the patterns of storytelling and how they

underlie and are the basic structure of our engagement and our understanding of reality.

I show how these stories culminate into the great mythical stories, but ultimately how all

these mythical stories find their

synthesis in the story of Christ.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. I'm actually not going to talk about icons today.

I always talk about icons and I always write about icons.

And I'm not going to talk about carving.

I'm going to talk about stories.

The talk that I was supposed to give was called

Encountering God in Story and Image.

But as I was preparing the two talks, the one I'll give today and tomorrow, I decided to put

them together.

They're kind of fused together.

And so images will come tomorrow in my talk.

And today, I'm going to bring in some of St.

Gregor of Nisa's ideas into the talk I'm going to give today.

So, I'm going to start with a statement. I'm going to start with a statement that is, the world is made of stories.

I mean, of course, the world is made of things as well, but mostly, I would say most significantly, the world is held

together by stories.

...