The Bard Project exists to recover the Great Stories and give them back to the people of God.
Your own life makes sense when it is set inside the great stories. The myths and histories and fairy tales, the lives of the saints, that locate us within the one Great Story: a world created good, fallen, redeemed at terrible cost, and even now being made new.
But we’ve lost them. Outside of a short list of moralized Bible stories, they are absent from the life of the church, and absent from the lives of every Christian unless they study them in school as artifacts. And with them has gone the Christian imagination.
For most of history, every community kept someone whose calling was to guard the great stories. The bard carried the stories and the songs that told a people where they came from, what they were for, and how their own small lives fit inside something vast.
THIS IS A CALL for a new generation OF BARDS.
Interested? Email Caroline Williams at caroline@anselmsociety.org.
“It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fool’s hope may be the best kind.”
“Poets kept and shaped the great stories, the mythoi that bound people to life, that reconnected them both with the sacred and with their own inner being.”
Preview: one petal of nine.
Scripture sits at the center, and nine petals radiate from it — the load-bearing patterns Scripture keeps returning to. Old stories from every culture that became Christendom are set as panels in the petal whose pattern they carry, alongside the symbols and motifs that make the pattern legible. Here is one of them.
Interested?
Email Caroline Williams at caroline@anselmsociety.org.