Summary: Framed as three meditations on Ecclesiastes, Smith wants us to pay attention to our presence in time as part of an embrace of our humanity. James KA Smith has greatly influenced me over the years. Desiring the Kingdom helped me think about how culture forms us and how we need to pay attention to cultural formation … Read more
Takeaway: Skip the audio and do this book in print. Four years ago, I was very favorable toward How (Not) to Be Secular, since then I have read a number of books that have interacted with Charles Taylor, although none of them have attempted what Jamie Smith has attempted here. In How (Not) To Be Secular, … Read more
Summary: We as humans do not change simply through new information, but we are shaped by “˜liturgy’, the habits and community rituals that surround us. I am quite late to actually reading Desiring the Kingdom. It was first published 9 years ago. I purchased it 4 years ago, but I didn’t actually read Desiring the … Read more
Takeaway: Expressive Worship and Formative Worship, while both valid, have different purposes. It is good to re-read books. I can not remember where I read it, but I remember a discussion about the difference in reading habits of people a couple hundred years ago. The short version is that books used to be very expensive. … Read more
Summary: A series of letters (modeled somewhat after Hitchen’s Letters to a Young Contrarian and Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholic) It is part of my naivete that I was aware of Letters to a Young Calvinist before I was aware of Hitchens’ or Weigel’s book. And when I typed in ‘Letters to a Young’ on Amazon, … Read more
Summary: The traditional story of how to the world came to be secular (a subtraction of belief) is not the real story. Starting last year I have been paying a lot of attention to James KA Smith (Jamie). The first book of his that came across my radar screen was Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and … Read more
Summary: Maybe our need for interpretation and our finiteness as humans is a feature of our creation, not a consequence of the fall. The more I read James KA Smith, the more I appreciate his perspective. The Fall of Interpretation was Smith’s first book. It was an adaptation of his Ph.D. dissertation that he lightly … Read more
Summary: A series of essays on faith and culture. James KA Smith is a philosophy professor at Calvin College and editor of Comment Magazine. He keeps coming across my radar screen but I have not read enough of his books. I picked up Discipleship in the Present Tense last year when it was released. It … Read more
Takeaway: Worship, Spiritual Development, Discipleship, all are based on what we do, not just what we think. Plans for growth and worship based primarily on knowledge break down and leave Christians ill prepared for actual life as a Christian. It has been six weeks since I have finished Imagining the Kingdom and I am still not … Read more
Summary: An exploration of how images and metaphors influence Evangelical thought (or don’t.) The Evangelical Imagination is the fourth of Karen Swallow Prior’s books I have read over the past 11 years, the sixth if you include the two classics in which she wrote the introduction. I have been in a private Facebook group and … Read more