History
Parables are favored in the expression of spiritual concepts. The best-known source of parables in Christianity is the Bible, which contains numerous parables in the Gospels section of the New Testament, Jesus' parables. The New Testament parables are thought by scholars such as John P. Meier to have been inspired by mashalim, a form of Hebrew comparison. Examples of Jesus' parables include "the Good Samaritan" and "the Prodigal Son". Mashalim from the Old Testament include the "parable of the ewe-lamb" told by Nathan in 2 Samuel 12:1-9, and that of "the woman of Tekoah" in 2 Samuel 14:1-13.
Parables also appear in Islam. In Sufi tradition, parables ("teaching stories") are used for imparting lessons and values. Recent authors such as Idries Shah and Anthony de Mello have helped popularize these stories beyond Sufi circles.
Modern stories can be used as parables. A mid-19th-century parable, the "Parable of the Broken Window", exposes a fallacy in economic thinking.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)