James K.A. Smith Quotes

#1. Discipleship and spiritual formation are less about erecting an edifice of knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively understands the world in light of the Gospel.

James K.A. Smith

#2. worship is not primarily a venue for innovative creativity but a place for discerning reception and faithful repetition. That

James K.A. Smith

#3. Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us.

James K.A. Smith

#4. Excarnation The process by which religion (and Christianity in particular) is dis-embodied and de-ritualized, turned into a belief system.

James K.A. Smith

#5. Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.

James K.A. Smith

#6. Analysis of the story will sometimes undercut our antepredicative grasp of it).

James K.A. Smith

#7. We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.

James K.A. Smith

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Learning what seems insignificant can be training us for (and about) what's essential - that what's ultimate can unwittingly be at stake in what appears to be innocuous.

James K.A. Smith

#11. 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

#12. What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?

James K.A. Smith

#13. too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.5

James K.A. Smith

#14. Sometimes to be creative you have to give yourself permission to not be outstanding.

James K.A. Smith

#15. education is most fundamentally a matter of formation,

James K.A. Smith

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Ethical knowledge is the emplotment of one's life in the theological narrative

James K.A. Smith

#20. The doubter's doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.

James K.A. Smith

#21. Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation.

James K.A. Smith

#22. Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.

James K.A. Smith

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.

James K.A. Smith

#28. James Smith argues that liturgies are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body.

James K.A. Smith

#29. 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

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

James K.A. Smith

#31. 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

#32. [E]ducation is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world
all before we ever start thinking about it.

James K.A. Smith

#33. We aren't really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts

James K.A. Smith

#34. Not surprisingly, where Barnes really appreciates the haunting of immanence is in the realm of the aesthetic.

James K.A. Smith

#35. Even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more - some "fullness" that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we've constructed in modernity.

James K.A. Smith

#36. 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

#37. Jesus is a teacher who doesn't just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn't content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings.

James K.A. Smith

#38. So it is precisely our allergy to repetition in worship that has undercut the counterformative power of Christian worship - because all kinds of secular liturgies shamelessly affirm the good of repetition.

James K.A. Smith

#39. 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

#40. What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture - the "stronger form of magic" found in the ever-new glow of consumer products

James K.A. Smith

#41. 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

#42. You might have Bible verses on the wall in every room of the house and yet the unspoken rituals reinforce self-centeredness rather than sacrifice. Thus

James K.A. Smith

#43. Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.

James K.A. Smith

#44. 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