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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6406f8e | Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices of the mall--the liturgies of mall and market--that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 116c8ce | The core claim of this book is that liturgies[ 8]--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." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f1c7402 | the Creator in whom we find our "rest" is only all too eager to welcome us into communion." -- | James K.A. Smith | ||
| b95529a | In short, God's welcome is a gracious way of reminding us of our utter dependence, cutting against the grain of myths of self-sufficiency that we've been immersed in all week long. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 65cea47 | This dependence and lack of self-sufficiency is then often affirmed horizontally, as it were, by encouraging the congregation to greet one another, expressing welcome | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 301cbb7 | How does that happen? I'm suggesting that Christian education has, for too long, been concerned with information rather than formation; thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a Christian perspective, an intellectual framework, because they see themselves as fostering individual "minds in the making."[6] Hand in hand with that, such an approach reduces Christianity to a denuded intellectual framework that has diminishe.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| bcc321d | so too we extend mutual greetings because God has welcomed us. As recipients of God's greeting, we become imitators of God by extending welcome to our neighbors and brothers and sisters. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 4ee2f73 | singing is a full-bodied action that activates the whole person--or at least more of the whole person than is affected by merely sitting and passively listening, or even reading and reciting texts. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5967cdd | In short, music and song seem to stand as packed microcosms of what it means to be human. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 2f8af79 | Second, singing is a mode of expression that seems to reside in our imagination more than other forms of discourse. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5e04916 | Music gets "in" us in ways that other forms of discourse rarely do." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 273e6de | A song gets absorbed into our imagination in a way that mere texts rarely do. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 6171a3e | This knitting of song into our bodies is why memorization of Scripture through song is often so effective. Song soaks into the very core of our being, which is why music is an important constitutive element of our identity. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 70e1b40 | Third, the church's music and songs constitute what Richard Mouw describes as a "compacted theology." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 026a130 | Scripture envisions the identity and faith of the people of God as a song. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| ce3715b | what we sing says something significant about who we are--and whose we are. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 3aed412 | Implicit in Christian worship is a vision not just for spiritual flourishing but also for human flourishing; this is not just practice for eternal bliss; it is training for temporal, embodied human community. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| ee773ab | Christian discipleship is the shape of what it means to be a renewed human being and constitutes a restoration of the gift and call of being human that was given and announced in the Garden of Eden. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 1d7825c | The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our --our goal, our end. But the we live toward is not something we primarily know or believe or think about; rather, our is what we , what we long for, what we crave. It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of "the good life" that we desire." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d7798b5 | In the action of gathering, there is a visceral training of our imagination that shapes how we subsequently think about our identity and our calling as human, in relation to God and in relation to others. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 6c4af96 | With hands raised, the minister extends God's welcome and blessing to the gathered congregation, who may receive the welcome and blessing with hands open in a spirit of mutual welcome and expectation. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 82023b7 | Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus--this inextricable link between imagination, narrative, and embodiment--thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 208ac7d | In contrast, right here in Christian worship we see a very different understanding of the good: humanity and all of creation flourish when they are rightly ordered to a telos that is not of their own choosing but rather is stipulated by God. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| a098514 | The announcement of the law reminds us that we inhabit not "nature," but creation, fashioned by a Creator, and that there is a certain grain to the universe--grooves and tracks and norms that are part of the fabric of the world." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 514aa0b | A reordering of creation has already broken into creation in the person of Jesus Christ, and we are gathering as a people in order to practice for the arrival of the kingdom in its fullness--and thus in order to be trained to be a kingdom-kind-of-people in the meantime, as witnesses to that kingdom, in and through our work as cultural agents. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f689d69 | like the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, baptism is a microcosm of the entirety of Christian worship and the story of God, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| a97943e | First, baptism is a rite of initiation into a people that at the same time effects the constitution of "a people." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| c56664d | God can throw down nations and plant new ones with a few drops of water. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| dc6d09b | baptism signifies a radical reordering of the social world in Christ precisely because it signifies that the priesthood is open to all | James K.A. Smith | ||
| db3b778 | First, the Apostles' Creed functions like the church's pledge of allegiance. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 51cee12 | Second, the shared recitation of the Creed constitutes us as a historical people. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 862038b | Third, the recitation of the Creed is the "I believe" moment in Christian worship." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 2a387a9 | 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." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| e9f894e | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 478fd5c | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 0307642 | Finally, as we prepare to hear the Word proclaimed, a prayer for illumination positions and challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reason. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 3db9d40 | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| adaad17 | But as James K. A. Smith puts it, when the only difference between Christians and non-Christians is that Christians go to church while non-Christians stay home and read the paper, you know something is amiss. | Gerald Hiestand | ||
| e714bd8 | A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5a77d01 | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 64e434e | Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| c497203 | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 288f2d6 | 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." | formation practices habits | James K.A. Smith | |
| ba0d265 | 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. | James K.A. Smith |