Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In this paper we examine the interactions and interdependencies amongst four different scales of storytelling employed in our interviews with people who identify as international Christian humanitarian workers (n=50, employed in global faith-based NGOs). As they recount their lives and their faith-based work, our participants move across four temporal, spatial and conceptual registers. While the use of multiple registers of storytelling is found in many contexts, the explicit, coherent and authoritative situating of narratives within “God’s story” makes makes this research especially fruitful for understanding how faith informs individual and collective worldview.