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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0b50a76 | 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." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 3bf4d36 | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5fd5e91 | 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, | James K.A. Smith | ||
| b4a4444 | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 6956824 | 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 .. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 7a6a7d4 | 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,.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 966a49b | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 2641388 | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| ada203f | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d8f45eb | Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 NIV | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 69eac5c | 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 .. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 4022320 | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5c33085 | In other words, codes are inadequate as moral sources precisely because they do not touch on the dynamics of moral motivation. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 15c0864 | How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 03ac433 | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 17e2bf7 | 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)." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 0f93b24 | 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." -- | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 15440fd | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 415e4b6 | 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." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 9e5db9c | The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f8343ae | 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.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d25d569 | 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]. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 02cc09a | James Smith argues that liturgies "are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body." | worship | James K.A. Smith | |
| 937a2c5 | 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 .. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 0750f15 | 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). .. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 24fbd85 | education is most fundamentally a matter of formation, | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 9e2ca0b | 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. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 577698c | Two recent books that make this case are by James K. A. Smith: Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009); and Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). Smith builds on Augustine's idea that what makes us what we are is the order of our loves, and therefore what changes us is changing not what we think but what we love. Smith rightly crit.. | Timothy Keller | ||
| 8bd4ff2 | The Supper is a gracious communion with a forgiving God; but it is also a supper we eat with one another, and that too will require forgiveness. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 452df65 | the postmodern critique is not aimed at metanarratives because they are really grounded in narratives; on the contrary, the problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| c6ec4b2 | Indeed, the for a Christian Christ: Jesus Christ is the very embodiment of what we're made for, of the end to which we are called....and how does this happen? By being regularly immersed in the drama of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, which is precisely the point of Christian worship--to invite us into that story over and over again, 'character-izing' us as we rehearse the gospel drama over and over. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f762718 | Derrida. Deconstruction's claim that there is "nothing outside the text" [il n'y a pas de hors-texte] can be considered a radical translation of the Reformation principle sola scrip-tura. In particular, Derrida's insight should push us to recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5522b71 | Lyotard. The assertion that postmodernity is "incredulity toward metanarratives" is ultimately a claim to be affirmed by the church, pushing us to recover (a) the narrative character of Christian faith, rather than understanding it as a collection of ideas, and (b) the confessional nature of our narrative and the way in which we find ourselves in a world of competing narratives." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| b149c3c | Foucault. The seemingly disturbing, even Nietzschean claim that "power is knowledge" should push us to realize what MTV learned long ago: (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b) the necessity of the church to enact counterformation by counterdisciplines. In other words, we need to think about discipline as a creational structure that needs proper direction. Foucault has something to tell us about what it means to b.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| c2490ed | It's not "meaning," and it's certainly not meaning in general, he says. "Indeed, there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific good or value. One might die for God, or the Revolution, or the classless society, but not for meaning" | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 388c3e9 | Our sanctification is more like a Weight Watchers program than listening to a book on tape. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f1c9400 | Pascal knew that Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it's indifference to them that must be learned. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| aae8737 | In strange, often unintended ways, the pursuit of "justice," shalom, and a "holistic" gospel can have its own secularizing effect. What begins as a gospel-motivated concern for justice can turn into a naturalized fixation on justice in which God never appears. And when that happens, "justice" becomes something else altogether--an idol, a way to effectively naturalize the gospel, flattening it to a social amelioration project in which the pa.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 0c10071 | The Scriptures function as the script of the worshiping community, the story that narrates the identity of the people of God, the constitution of this baptismal city, and the fuel of the Christian imagination. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 5568821 | When the Scriptures are read in the context of gathered worship, they are, in a sense, enacted at the same time. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| fa32314 | Scripture also functions as something like the constitution of the baptismal city. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 08869ea | we should emphasize that the narrative of Scripture is a primary fund for the Christian imagination. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 319c206 | The tangible display and performance of the gospel in the Lord's Supper is a deeply affecting practice. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| a1a11be | First, lest we pass too quickly over the mundane and obvious, we should appreciate that the stuff of the Lord's Supper--the "elements" as they're sometimes called--are rather ho-hum stuff: bread and wine, staples of any daily diet in many parts of the world and across history." | James K.A. Smith |