INTRODUCTION

"The oldest style of story is the myth. Pure and simple, it's the fabrication about the origins of our race and our world, though not always as elaborated as we find it in the book of Genesis. Alongside it arose Aesop's fables. Aesop, according to the historian Herodotus, was a slave who lived in the mid-sixth century before Christ, about the same time as one of the Genesis stories was circulating. Grimm's fairy tales and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the nineteenth-century Danish storyteller, have almost the same appeal - the color, aroma, taste - as the short story and novel. The parables of Jesus belong to this great classic literature, and excel it."

Joseph Fichtner, OSC
Many Things in Parables
Reflections for Life