You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

by James K.A. Smith

love is the condition for knowledge. It’s not that I know in order to love, but rather: I love in order to know.

You are what you desire.

To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of “the good life.”

Love is like autopilot, orienting us without our thinking about it.

Virtues are learned and acquired, through imitation and practice. 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.

Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of “nonconscious” or “automatic” operations that shape our behavior—confirming, in many ways, the ancient wisdom of philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas.10

we unconsciously learn to love rival kingdoms because we don’t realize we’re participating in rival liturgies.

You won’t be liberated from deformation by new information.

“I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?’”8

The rituals of political liberalism (whether one is ideologically more “liberal” or more “conservative”) paint a picture of the family as the incubator of good citizens, dutiful producers, and eager consumers at the same time that it shuts up the family in a private, closed home as part of the American ideal of independence.14