Home > Author > James K.A. Smith
101 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
102 " 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 conditioned, it is possible for both to be spontaneous and improvisational. I learn how to constitute my world from others, but I learn how to constitute my world. The “I” that perceives is always already a “we.” My "
― James K.A. Smith , Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works
103 " 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 , You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
104 " Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us. "
105 " 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 notable lack of charity. I had become a caricature of the unforgiving servant in Jesus’s parable (Matt. 18:23–35). At times, I saw creeping versions of the same pride in these young folks I spent time with in Los Angeles – an arrogance I understood but also abhorred. And in this particular case, there seemed to be something in their Calvinism that gave comfort to wider cultural notions of machismo that did not reflect the radical grace and mercy of the gospel. "
― James K.A. Smith , Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition
106 " 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. "
107 " 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 , How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor
108 " 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 foremost an unpacking of Paul’s vision of what it meant that Christ is risen. "
109 " 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, "
110 " 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. "
111 " 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 love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies. "
112 " 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, of sights and smell in water and wine. "
113 " 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. "
114 " 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 materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality” (p. 365). "
115 " 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. One "
116 " Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 NIV "
117 " 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 ask of you anything you wouldn’t want to do. So we get significance without any ascetic moral burden. But "
118 " 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. 485). The Place of the Sacred in Our Secular Age What is the “imagined place of the sacred” in a society governed by expressivist individualism (p. 486)? Taylor has already hinted that such a society seems to forge its own “festive” rendition of the sacred — “moments of fusion in a common action/feeling, which both wrench us out of the everyday, and seem to put us in touch with something exceptional, beyond ourselves. "
119 " In other words, codes are inadequate as moral sources precisely because they do not touch on the dynamics of moral motivation. "
120 " How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity. "