Parables are a powerful tool. They are maps, life lessons encoded into little stories, encapsulated ways of understanding the world. However, what a parable is is as much our understanding of the tale as it is the tale itself – it’s in the mapping from that story to our story, the understanding that its causality and morality bears some relationship to our own. Any story can become a parable as long as you can create an analogical framework – in fact, every story can and does become many parables, given different frameworks and understandings. Each parable reflects a personal understanding, a relationship between the tale’s teller, its audience, and the world, and these shift subtly, even from people whose understanding of the story and its import are largely the same – and drastically between those whose approach and worldviews are significantly different.

This causes problems. Oppressors frequently like to cast…