Empires have always understood the power of story. Before they seize land, they seize imagination. They craft narratives to justify their control—stories that decide who belongs and who doesn’t, whose wisdom is preserved and whose is erased. These stories turn into systems, and systems become the scaffolding of the world.
Edward Said once wrote, “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.” It’s a haunting reminder that the visible battles of empire—those fought over borders, bodies, and soil—begin with battles over narrative. Nations themselves are stories written into law, recited until they are believed. And people have died trying to cross those stories.
To be colonized is not only to lose political or territorial sovereignty—it is to have one’s story rewritten, one’s imagination subdued. Empire decides who gets to speak, whose testimony counts as credible, whose way of knowing is dismissed as superstition or emotion. Over time, those stories sink deep into us—through our textbooks, our politics, our theologies, even the ways we narrate our families and ourselves.
But stories have never belonged only to empire. They have always been the ground of resistance.
Decolonizing, then, is about remembering. It is the sacred work of returning to the stories empire tried to erase and reclaiming the truth that there have always been other ways to know, to learn, to be. Ways not defined by conquest or hierarchy, but by connection and reciprocity.
My friend and fellow author Kaitlin Curtice writes beautifully about this in her new book, Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives. She reminds us that stories are not static—they are alive, breathing among us, shaping and reshaping the world. “Stories,” she writes, “are more than the tales we tell—they are living, moving, and prophesying among us.”
That line—stories are prophesying among us—is what inspired the name of this episode. Because when we speak of prophecy, we’re really talking about storytelling. The Greek word propheteia means “to speak before,” or “to speak for.” A prophet, then, is a storyteller—one who speaks before power, who tells the truth empire refuses to name.
If colonization is the erasure of one’s story, then reclaiming that story—naming it, telling it, remembering it—is an act of resistance. It is, in itself, an act of prophecy.
The prophets of Scripture knew this well. They weren’t fortune-tellers predicting the future; they were truth-tellers naming the present. Jeremiah stood in the shadow of Babylon and declared that the temple was no refuge for injustice. Amos cried out that God desired justice to roll down like waters, not empty rituals that upheld the powerful. They were storytellers who refused empire’s version of reality.
And maybe that’s the call for us, too—to become prophets of our own stories. To tell the truth about what empire has done to us and to our world, but also what it has failed to destroy. To tell the stories that still pulse with life—the ones that carry us home.
May we become keepers of the stories empire tried to silence.
May we listen for the truths still humming beneath the noise of conquest—the songs, the prayers, the quiet remembering that refuse to die.
And as we speak our stories aloud, may we find ourselves prophesying too: telling the truth about the present, dreaming a future that empire cannot imagine, and living into a world where every story, every body, and every breath is sacred.
I wanted to send this episode to your inbox, but episode three is out too! Listen to that one first, if you’re listening in order.
Liturgies for Resisting Empire is still 40% off + free shipping!
