Short stories are modern parables

While reading The Space Traders by Derrick Bell it struck me that short stories are the modern world’s parables. The genre’s are different: parables are bare-bones and have one main point, while short stories can expand beyond a single point and include details which don’t develop the message directly.

This was a fascinating discovery, since I’ve been pondering what it’d be like to develop my own parables. Would it be possible, like Jesus, to craft a short message in a cryptic parable that I could share with friends and family that wouldn’t be immediately understood but might later produce a light-bulb moment. Jesus was able to critique the Jerusalem leaders in public because he cloaked the message in a cryptic parable, and it’d be thrilling to do the same.

My biggest barrier has been finding modern-day parables from which I could make templates. It’s not that Jesus' parables aren’t rich examples, they’re the best, but he assumes an implicit understanding of the Hebrew Bible at minimum. Most Americans aren’t going to catch that a parable about a vineyard is riffing on Isaiah (compare Matthew 21:33 with Isaiah 5:1). Parables that might land with Americans are more likely to share cultural references, historical contexts, and such. Short stories, on the other hand, are plentiful and powerful, and there are numerous resources to learn how to form them.