Indeed, “Our hearts traffic in stories,” James K. A. Smith writes in Imagining the Kingdom. “We are narrative animals whose very orientation to the world is fundamentally shaped by stories.”40 We see this storied aspect of our lives in the most mundane, everyday ways—for example, when a loved one relays a funny or interesting incident, not by rushing to the outcome but by re-creating the whole scene, narrating it from start to finish in the form of an entertaining story.
