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James K.A. Smith QUOTES

James K.A. Smith QUOTES

21 " 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. "

― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

22 " We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity. "

― James K.A. Smith , Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

23 " In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love. "

― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

24 " Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 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. "

― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

25 " 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 "

― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

26 " 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). "

― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

27 " Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718). "

― James K.A. Smith , How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

28 " 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). "

― James K.A. Smith , Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

29 " Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui. "

― James K.A. Smith , How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

30 " 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 "

― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

31 " 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. "

― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

32 " 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 happy to inhabit the goodness of flesh. Furthermore, materiality receives an eschatological affirmation in our hope for the resurrection of the body. Even the future kingdom will be a material environment of sacramentality. On the other hand, when an incarnational ontology and anthropology are linked with our earlier affirmation of time and tradition, a catholic postmodernism also affirms a special sacramentality - a special presence and means of grace in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. "

― James K.A. Smith , Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

33 " 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. "

― James K.A. Smith , Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition

34 " You can't think your way into new hungers. "

― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

35 " 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 Lord in the simple routine of that daily promise of dinner together. Then "

― James K.A. Smith , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

36 " Instead, Taylor is concerned with the “conditions of belief” — a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable. "

― James K.A. Smith , How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

37 " 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. "

― James K.A. Smith , How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

38 " 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 their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a “value-free” education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative. "

― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

39 " What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love? "

― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

40 " 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. "

― James K.A. Smith , On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts