You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K. A. Smith

By James K. A. Smith

You're what you're keen on. yet you may now not love what you think.

In this publication, award-winning writer James K. A. Smith exhibits that who and what we worship essentially form our hearts. And whereas we wish to form tradition, we're not frequently conscious of how tradition shapes us. we would no longer notice the methods our hearts are being taught to like rival gods rather than the single for whom we have been made. Smith is helping readers realize the formative energy of tradition and the transformative chances of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the "imagination station" that incubates our loves and longings in order that our cultural endeavors are listed towards God and his country. this is because the church and worshiping in an area group of believers will be the hub and middle of Christian formation and discipleship.

Following the book of his influential paintings Desiring the Kingdom, Smith bought quite a few requests from pastors and leaders for a extra available model of that book's content material. No mere abridgment, this new ebook attracts on years of Smith's well known shows at the principles in Desiring the dominion to supply a clean, bottom-up rearticulation. the writer creatively makes use of movie, literature, and song illustrations to interact readers and comprises new fabric on marriage, kin, adolescence ministry, and religion and paintings. He additionally indicates person and communal practices for shaping the Christian lifestyles.

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Thus Christians tend to be allergic to eros (and often set up stark contrasts between eros and agape, the latter of which we hallow as “Christian” love). 6 In its truest sense, eros signals a desire and attraction that is a good feature of our creaturehood. Instead of setting up a false dichotomy between agape and eros, we could think of agape as rightly ordered eros: the love of Christ that is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5) is a redeemed, rightly ordered desire for God.

Augustine reveals a very different model of the human person than we typically assume. This model provides a framework for thinking about the task of discipleship, the nature of sanctification, and the role of worship. Let’s unpack this through a metaphor that provides a way to “picture” what we’re talking about. Orienting Desire: The Quest to Be Human To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward a destination of your dreams. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: “You have to wager.

9 We all know the principle Augustine is talking about. Have you ever played in a swimming pool and tried to hold a beach ball under the surface? Its tendency—you might even say its penchant and desire—is to rise to the surface. It is “restless” when it is held under the water. It keeps trying to sneak up from under your feet or hands, bursting toward the surface. It wants to be floating. Conversely, when I try to placidly float on the surface of the pool, my weight wants to take me to the bottom.

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