The Roots of Everything

Since the Scientific Revolution, we've been telling ourselves a very specific narrative about our own history, one that's so biased even secular scholars now refer to it as the "myth of progress." But myth or not, it still rules our imaginations.

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Folk stories used to be local, human, and participatory, but in our time stories have become corporatized and dis-incarnated. Are tabletop games, and role-playing games in particular, a way we return to local stories that we both tell and inhabit?

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Why did Tolkien hate allegory but fill his stories with mythic imagery? Because there's a difference between disguising your point as an author and telling a story grounded in eternal themes. This is the reason that the most beloved children's books are so resonant!

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In consumer culture we think of stories as entertainment and aesthetics as decoration, but that is not how ancient people thought. Stories for them were religious, and beauty was the image of truth. We see this most profoundly in Orthodoxy's relationship to aesthetics.

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In every culture and every age, people tell stories. It's a universal human practice because reality itself is a story. Because stories are worldviews, they are more religious than anything else. How you read the story, therefore, makes all the difference.

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