Imagining the Kingdom Quotes

“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, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“In short, the way to the heart is through the body, and the way into the body is throughs tory. And this is how worship works: Christian formation is a conversion of the imagination effected by the Spirit, who recruits our most fundamental desires by a kind of narrative enchantment---by inviting us narrative animals into a story that seeps into our bones and becomes the orienting background of our being-in-the-world.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works

“analysis of the story will sometimes undercut our antepredicative grasp of it).”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“A Christian education cannot be content to produce thinkers; it should aim to produce agents. Such formation not only offers content for minds; it also impinges on the nexus of habits and desires that functions as the activity center of the human person. The driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood, so to speak, without needing to be thought about.[31] These loves, longings, and habits orient and propel our being-in-the-world. The focus on formation is holistic because its end is Christian action: what’s at stake here is not just how we think about the world but how we inhabit the world—how we act. We are what we love precisely because we do what we love.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“The "truth" of journalism and surveillance cameras and articulated propositions might not be the most interesting or most important sort of truth. What I know to be true through a novel or poem might be more significant than the litany of true "facts" that can be endlessly Googled. The truth of art---the truth of the aesthetic aspect of our existence---does not reduce to mere representation or correspondence.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works

“James Smith argues that liturgies “are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works

“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 (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus—this inextricable link between imagination, narrative, and embodiment—thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result, we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination. Moreover, because of this neglect and our stunted anthropology, we have failed to recognize the degree and extent to which secular liturgies do implicitly capitalize on our embodied penchant for storied formation. This becomes a way to account for Christian assimilation to consumerism, nationalism, and various stripes of egoisms. These isms have had all the best embodied stories. The devil has had all the best liturgies.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“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, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works