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Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation QUOTES

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation traffics in ashes and dust, blood and bodies, fish and bread. And he pronounces all of it “very good "

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

7 " What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? "

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

8 " The soul therefore needs three things: eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing. "

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

9 " When we gather, we are responding to a call to worship; that call is an echo and renewal of the call of creation to be God’s image bearers for the world, and we fulfill the mission of being God’s image bearers by undertaking the work of culture making. "

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

10 " we are witnessing to the fact that God’s action in the cross and resurrection has made it possible for humanity to be human, to take up their creational vocation "

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

11 " What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds? "

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

12 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

13 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

14 " the Creator in whom we find our “rest” is only all too eager to welcome us into communion. "

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

15 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

16 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

17 " so too we extend mutual greetings because God has welcomed us. "

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

18 " 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 diminished bite because such an intellectualized rendition of the faith doesn’t touch our core passions. This is because such intellectualization of Christianity allows it to be unhooked from the thick practices of the church. When the Christianity of “Christian education” is reduced to the intellectual elements of a Christian worldview or a Christian perspective, the result is that Christianity is turned “into a belief system available to the individual without mediation by the church.”[ "

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

19 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

20 " 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 , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation