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d8241cf
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The doubter's doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.
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James K.A. Smith |
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d07a907
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Excarnation The process by which religion (and Christianity in particular) is dis-embodied and de-ritualized, turned into a "belief system."
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James K.A. Smith |
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47ef4da
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The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, through the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love (God) takes practice.
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James K.A. Smith |
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c9f647f
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Discipleship, we might say, is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love.
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James K.A. Smith |
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85c8a2d
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Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow.
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James K.A. Smith |
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1ec1fc2
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It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly "express" these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. "Doctrines" are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we "understand" when we pray."
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worship
prayer
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James K.A. Smith |
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c75695c
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We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.
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James K.A. Smith |
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29eda3e
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In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.
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James K.A. Smith |
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6a65641
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Antoine de Saint-Exupery captures this well: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
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James K.A. Smith |
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f7cd0d7
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Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn't just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts. Form
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James K.A. Smith |
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f289fc4
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By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms tr..
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imagination
disciplines
marketing
desire
ritual
values
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James K.A. Smith |
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6c5a4ad
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It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy, which seeks to reanimate the account of knowledge offered by Augustine and Aquinas. On this ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model, we rightly give up pretensions to absolute knowledge or certainty, but we do not thereby give up on knowledge altogether. Rather, we can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himse..
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christianity
jesus
god
radical-orthodoxy
religious-knowledge
objectivity
revelation
knowledge
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James K.A. Smith |
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3430917
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A sacramental understanding of the world is simply a shorthand way of describing the psalmist's claim that "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it" (Ps. 24:1), echoed in Paul's claim that in the Creator God "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28)."
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James K.A. Smith |
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f3d0ad3
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Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).
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James K.A. Smith |
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9369419
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Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).
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philosophy
interpretation
derrida
presuppositional-apologetics
postmodernism
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James K.A. Smith |
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ed267d3
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Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui.
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James K.A. Smith |
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e0fb755
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It's like we have moral muscles that are trained in the same way our biological muscles are trained when we practice a golf swing or piano scales. Now
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James K.A. Smith |
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56e09ab
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As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: "You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed."7 You can't not bet your life on something. You can't not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for."
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James K.A. Smith |
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bc9eeeb
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Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.
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worldview
narrative
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James K.A. Smith |
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44dab7d
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The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific commu..
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christianity
god
church-history
liberal-christianity
primitivism
evangelicalism
tradition
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James K.A. Smith |
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b9677d9
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Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is ..
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god
materiality
means-of-grace
sacramentalism
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James K.A. Smith |
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f38b99c
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In fact, I must tell you that in the past couple years I've become convinced that perhaps nothing is so important for our walk with the Lord as good friends. I think God gives us good friends as sacraments - means of grace given to us as indices of God's presence and conduits for our sanctification.
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James K.A. Smith |
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eea13ad
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You can't think your way into new hungers.
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James K.A. Smith |
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7230b8d
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By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been ex..
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prejudice
christianity
philosophy
lyotard
metanarrative
the-enlightenment
objectivity
narrative
knowledge
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James K.A. Smith |
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3f3789e
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For example: never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view, especially when dinner is the primary occasion for sibling bickering. Yet even then, members of your little tribe are learning to love their neighbor. And your children are learning something about the faithful promises of a covenant-keeping L..
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James K.A. Smith |
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f804279
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Instead, Taylor is concerned with the "conditions of belief" -- a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable."
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James K.A. Smith |
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a1ef00a
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Subtraction stories Accounts that explain "the secular" as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what's left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled."
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James K.A. Smith |
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e0ef789
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An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out "skilled workers") that see t..
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James K.A. Smith |
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b69fd2d
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What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?
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James K.A. Smith |
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a6d87e8
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This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about you. It's a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It's a travelogue of the heart. It's a road trip with a prodigal who's already been where you think you need to go.
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James K.A. Smith |
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9620008
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Liturgy," as I'm using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we're for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation. To return to our metaphor above, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies: they bend the needle of our hearts."
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James K.A. Smith |
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6ff88da
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In Jack Kerouac's iconic novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise plays chronicler to the antics of the star of the story, Dean Moriarty, who is really the exemplar, the hero, the model. So just call me Sal. I've been on a ride with Augustine. Here's what I've seen; here's what he's shown me (about myself); here's why you might consider coming along.
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James K.A. Smith |
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d15cc90
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He meets us where we are, as creatures of habit who are shaped by practices, and invites us into a community of practice that is the very of his Son. Liturgy is the way we learn to 'put on' Christ.
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James K.A. Smith |
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d92c024
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Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.
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enlightenment
christianity
reason
truth
rational
total-depravity
sin
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James K.A. Smith |
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6a9139c
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analysis of the story will sometimes undercut our antepredicative grasp of it).
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James K.A. Smith |
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257228d
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what does it look like to bear witness in a secular age? What does it look like to be faithful? To what extent have Christians unwittingly absorbed the tendencies of this world? On the one hand, this raises the question of how to reach exclusive humanists. On the other hand, the question bounces back on the church: To what extent do we "believe" like exclusive humanists?"
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James K.A. Smith |
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d269d1a
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even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more -- some "fullness" that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we've constructed in modernity."
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James K.A. Smith |
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f7bde4e
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Acknowledging the interpreted status of the gospel should translate into a certain humility in our public theology. It should not, however, translate into skepticism about the truth of the Christian confession. If the interpretive status of the gospel rattles our confidence in its truth, this indicates that we remain haunted by the modern desire for objective certainty. But our confidence rests not on objectivity but rather on the convictio..
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James K.A. Smith |
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c92df9e
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But should we accept this negative view of power? Is power all bad? Specifically, can Christians share in this devaluation of power and discipline as inherently evil? Can we who claim to be disciples - who are called and predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29) - be opposed to discipline and formation as such? Can we who are called to be subject to the Lord of life really agree with the liberal Enlightenment notion..
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jesus
god
spiritual-discipline
spiritual-formation
church
discipline
power
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James K.A. Smith |
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0829ce3
|
While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically these disciplines and practices are aimed at very different ends. And here we must make an important distinction: we can distinguish good discipline from bad discipline by its telos, its goal or end. So the difference between the disciplines that form us into disci..
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spiritual-discipline
spiritual-formation
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James K.A. Smith |
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254b819
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Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation traffics in ashes and dust, blood and bodies, fish and bread. And he pronounces all of it "very good"
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James K.A. Smith |
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08eaefd
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Formative Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord--and a vision of the he desires for creation--in a way that captures our imagination....The biblical vision of --of a world where the Lamb is our light, where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where abundance is enjoyed by all, where people from every tribe and tongue and nation sing the same song of praise, where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness li..
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James K.A. Smith |
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c048de3
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The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological institution.16 It is in this sense, then, that the modern state is a parody of the church: "The body of the state is a simulacrum, a false copy, of the Body of Christ" (RONT, 182). As a result, while political rhetoric may suggest that the state is ..
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James K.A. Smith |
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8125361
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But one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Taylor argues, was a disenchantment of the world. Critical of the ways such an enchanted, sacramental understanding of the world had lapsed into sheer superstition, the later Reformers emphasized the simple hearing of the Word, the message of the gospel, and the arid simplicity of Christian worship. The result was a process of excarnation--of disembodying the Christian fa..
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James K.A. Smith |