ABSTRACT
Perhaps appropriately for a paper that has religious narrative cognition as its theme, but inappropriately for an academic presentation, I want to risk introducing my subject here with a confession-peccavi.1 The confession I have is simple. It is that, in addition to its irritatingly long title, marked by such an awful excess of rhyme, my paper sins against what may be thought of as a fundamental ethical imperative in narrative. It fails to present a story with a clearly demarcated beginning and a quasi-moral ending that would satisfactorily clinch my own argument. In this respect, it appears to contradict the very thesis that I earlier outlined with naïve conviction in my book Narrative Gravity (2002)—namely, that narrative constitutes a well-attested species of “proto-” or “natural theory.” There, I argued that:
In other words-in my examination of a host of putative narrative schema presented by linguists from Labov onwards, through the structuralist story-grammars of Rumelhart, Mandler and Johnson to Speech Act and Relevance theory-I came in Narrative Gravity to a rather unsurprising but perhaps plausible conclusion. The universal presence and power of narrative across all known human cultures derived from the way in which this genre uniquely combined emotional gratification with the possibilities of rational speculation, leading to definite conclusions-one might call them quasi-religious certainties-that a listener could carry away with from the text.
