David Brooks in The New York Times today —
"We once had a unifying national story, celebrated each Thanksgiving.
It was an Exodus story. Americans are the people who escaped oppression,
crossed a wilderness and are building a promised land. The Puritans brought
this story with them. Each wave of immigrants saw themselves in this story.
The civil rights movement embraced this story.
But we have to admit that many today do not resonate with this story. . . .
Today, we have no common national narrative, no shared way
of interpreting the flow of events. Without a common story,
we don’t know what our national purpose is. We have no
common set of goals or ideals.
We need a new national narrative."
From a post of August 15, 2010 —
For some background, see Java Jive and Today's Theology.
Related readings —
From 1928:
From the previous post:
"Thus, instead of Propp's chronological scheme,
in which the order of succession of events
is a feature of the structure . . .
another scheme should be adopted, which would present
a structural model defined as the group of transformations
of a small number of elements. This scheme would appear
as a matrix . . . ."
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1960
