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First, baptism is a rite of initiation into a people that at the same time effects the constitution of "a people."
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James K.A. Smith |
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God can throw down nations and plant new ones with a few drops of water.
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James K.A. Smith |
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baptism signifies a radical reordering of the social world in Christ precisely because it signifies that the priesthood is open to all
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James K.A. Smith |
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First, the Apostles' Creed functions like the church's pledge of allegiance.
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James K.A. Smith |
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Second, the shared recitation of the Creed constitutes us as a historical people.
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James K.A. Smith |
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Third, the recitation of the Creed is the "I believe" moment in Christian worship."
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James K.A. Smith |
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What we believe is not a matter of intellectualizing salvation but rather a matter of knowing what to love, knowing to whom we pledge allegiance, and knowing what is at stake for us as people of the "baptismal city." In reciting it each week, we rehearse the skeletal structure of the story in which we find our identity."
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James K.A. Smith |
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e9f894e
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And I'm looking through the glass Where the light bends at the cracks And I'm screaming at the top of my lungs Pretending the echoes belong to someone -- Someone I used to know.
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James K.A. Smith |
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It is because we are God's ambassadors and image bearers, charged with caring for creation, that we bring to him the concerns of creation, praying for each other, for the church, and for the world at large.
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James K.A. Smith |
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Finally, as we prepare to hear the Word proclaimed, a prayer for illumination positions and challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reason.
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James K.A. Smith |
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Habitus, then, is a kind of compatibilism. As a social being acting in the world, I'm not an unconstrained "free" creature "without inertia"; neither am I the passive victim of external causes and determining forces. Neither mechanical determinism nor libertarian freedom can really make sense of our being-in-the-world because our freedom is both "conditioned and conditional." Both our perception and our action are conditioned, but as condit..
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James K.A. Smith |
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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
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James K.A. Smith |
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To recognize the limits of knowledge is not to embrace ignorance. We don't need less than knowledge; we need more. We need to recognize the power of habit.
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James K.A. Smith |
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Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us.
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James K.A. Smith |
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However, in looking back at the enthusiasm of my younger, newly Calvinist self, I also cringe at the rough edges of my spiritual hubris - an especially ugly vice. The simple devotion of my brothers and sisters became an occasion for derision, and I spent an inordinate amount of time pointing out the error of their ("Arminian") ways. How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notab..
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James K.A. Smith |
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According to Maximus the Confessor in "One Hundred Chapters of Love", the key to directing and increasing one's desire for God is the acquisition of the virtues-which, you'll recall, we described above as noncognitive "dispositions" acquired through practices. So how does one acquire such virtues, such dispositions of desire? Through participation in concrete Christian practices like confession."
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formation
habits
practices
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James K.A. Smith |
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ba0d265
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The secular3 age is a level playing field. We're all trying to make sense of where we are, even why we are, and it's not easy for any of us.
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James K.A. Smith |
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0b50a76
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We have already seen how modernity does away with "higher" times, leaving us to the merely chronological tick-tock of "secular" time. However, our own experience suggests that the unstoppable homogeneity of time is unbearable and unsustainable for us as humans."
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James K.A. Smith |
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3bf4d36
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It is Augustine who is really the patron saint of the Reformation - and only because the Reformers saw Augustine's theology as a powerful expression of a robustly Pauline theology. So without wanting to sound overly pious or triumphant, I think it is very important to see that "Reformed theology" was not a sixteenth-century invention. It was a recovery and rearticulation of a basically Augustinian worldview, which was itself first and forem..
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James K.A. Smith |
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5fd5e91
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You won't be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn't deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead,
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James K.A. Smith |
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b4a4444
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So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible.
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James K.A. Smith |
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The core claim of this book is that liturgies8--whether "sacred" or "secular"--shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love. They do this because we are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down. Liturgies aim our ..
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James K.A. Smith |
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7a6a7d4
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Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly--who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship--through affective impact, over time,..
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James K.A. Smith |
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Because when the thin gruel of do-it-yourself spirituality turns out to be isolating, lonely, and unable to endure crises, the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd might find itself surprisingly open to something entirely different.
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James K.A. Smith |
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2641388
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The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion; if someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don't believe them. Because what's usually captured the person is not scientific evidence per se, but the form of science: "Even where the conclusions of science seem to be doing the work of conversion, it is very often not the detailed findings so much as the form" (p. 362). Indeed, "the appeal of scientific material..
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James K.A. Smith |
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ada203f
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But once you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you'll then realize that temptation isn't just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it's often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren't just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices.25 And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves. On..
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James K.A. Smith |
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Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 NIV
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James K.A. Smith |
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The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.) But what at? What is the object? Is there an object?" (p. 355). Nevertheless, we can't quite shake our feeling that "there must be an object." And so, Taylor suggests, even this disembedded art "trades on resonances of the cosmic in us" (p. 356). And conveniently, art is never going to ..
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James K.A. Smith |
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4022320
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Here is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-'60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early American republic, etc.) this value was contained and surrounded by other values that were a scaffolding of formation (e.g., the citizen ethic; p. 484). What erodes in the last half century is precisely these limits on individual fulfillment (p. 4..
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James K.A. Smith |
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In other words, codes are inadequate as moral sources precisely because they do not touch on the dynamics of moral motivation.
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James K.A. Smith |
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How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity.
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James K.A. Smith |
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We often hear of brand loyalty, even brand "devotion." But do people really worship brands? Is consumerism really such a "liturgical" experience? It may not be as far fetched as you think. In a recent study to consider the effect of "super brands" such as Apple and Facebook, researchers made an intriguing discovery. When they analyzed the brain activity of product fanatics, like members of the Apple cult, they found that "the Apple products..
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James K.A. Smith |
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17e2bf7
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There is a specter haunting our secular age, "the spectre of meaninglessness" (p. 717) -- which is, in a sense, a dispatch from fullness. And because this won't go away, but rather keeps pressing and pulling, it generates "unease" (p. 711) and "restlessness" (p. 726)."
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James K.A. Smith |
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0f93b24
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classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; "presuppositional" apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true." --
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James K.A. Smith |
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15440fd
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the end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people.
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James K.A. Smith |
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415e4b6
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And when our songs attribute the action of worship to us ("Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down . . ."), then worship is understood as fundamentally an expression of human will, a Pelagian endeavor of self-assertion."
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James K.A. Smith |
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The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our
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James K.A. Smith |
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I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It's hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work..
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James K.A. Smith |
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For Lyotard, metanarratives are a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories that not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal stories do this) but also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the story's claim by an appeal to universal reason...It is the supposed rationality of modern scientistic stories about the world that makes them a metanarrative [pg. 65].
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James K.A. Smith |
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02cc09a
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James Smith argues that liturgies "are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body."
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worship
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James K.A. Smith |
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937a2c5
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Todd Billings has articulated the dynamics of theological interpretation in a way that resonates with my account of Derrida's emphasis on context and communal criteria for what constitutes a "good" interpretation. As Billings winsomely puts it, the ecclesial and theological interpretation of Scripture invites us into "the spacious and yet specified place of wrestling with, chewing on, and performing Scripture."[422] The generous boundaries ..
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James K.A. Smith |
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Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates" (p. 695). How do we manage to do it? Or how could we? "Well, one way is that performance of these standards has become part of what we understand as a decent, civilized human life" (p. 696). ..
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James K.A. Smith |
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education is most fundamentally a matter of formation,
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James K.A. Smith |
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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.
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James K.A. Smith |