We are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel.
Four important revisions to my own definition of worldview were in order. First was a recognition that a worldview is not just a set of basic concepts but a fundamental orientation of the heart. Second was an explicit insistence that at the deepest root of a worldview is its commitment to and understanding of the “really real.” Third was a consideration of behavior in the determination of what one’s own or another’s worldview really is. Fourth was a broader understanding of how worldviews are grasped as story, not just as abstract propositions.
With timeless insight, Frederick Buechner introduces us to the Jesus of the Gospel. The old, old story begins to ring new as Buechner revisits the ancient stories and shows us different aspects of the face of Jesus. Here we see the story behind the story. The story which we are invited into. Our story. If occasionally you find that the stories of Jesus found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have become so familiar they fall flat, this book will help you experience the wonder of reading them again as if for the first time. The faces of Jesus, his "ways of being and being seen" are illuminated in six chapters: Annunciation, Nativity, Ministry, Last Supper, Crucifixon, and Resurrection. The focus of the faces of Jesus is that whatever else he may have been, he was a man once and had a "man’s face, a human face." ~ G. Richard Wheatcroft
It is worth considering the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient. Never before have there been so many different national news sources — different now in terms of both medium and ideology. Major newspapers from anywhere are available online; there are the broadcast networks plus public TV, cable’s CNN, Fox News, CNBC, et al., print and Web magazines, Internet bulletin boards, The Daily Show, e-mail newsletters, blogs. All this is well known; it’s part of the Media Environment we live in. But there are prices and ironies here. One is that the increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has — rather counterintuitively — created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options. Another is that the ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which “the truth” is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.