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How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the world. Worship "works" by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation.
Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook.
- Sales Rank: #115610 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-02-15
- Released on: 2013-02-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
From the Back Cover
A Liturgical Theology of Culture
"Imagining the Kingdom is a fit successor to Jamie Smith's remarkable Desiring the Kingdom. The new book is, like its predecessor, learned but lively, provocative but warmhearted, a manifesto and a guide. Smith takes Christians deeper into the artistic, imaginative, and practical resources on which we must draw if we wish to renew not only our minds but also our whole beings in Christ."
--Alan Jacobs, Honors College of Baylor University
"In this wonderfully rich and engagingly readable book of 'liturgical anthropology,' Smith makes a persuasive case for the thesis that human beings are best understood as worshiping animals. It has important implications at once for practical theology's reflection on religious formation, liturgy, and pedagogy and for philosophical theorizing about just what religion is. And it develops as an engaging and lively conversation among an astonishing mix of people: imagine Calvin, Proust, Merleau-Ponty, Augustine, Wendell Berry, Bourdieu, and David Foster Wallace all in the same room really talking to each other about being human and how to think about it!"
--David Kelsey, Yale Divinity School
"Jamie Smith shows us that the gospel does not primarily happen between our ears but in all the movements of the body by which we are formed and in turn form the world. I know of no more thorough and sophisticated account of how secular liturgies form and deform us and how Christian liturgies can help. Though sophisticated, Smith's book is also a delight. Its pages are filled with great poetry and insights from films, novels, and everyday life."
--William T. Cavanaugh, DePaul University
"A thought-provoking, generative reflection on the imagination-shaping power of Christian worship practices. What an ideal book for crossing boundaries among academic disciplines and between the academy and the church."
--John D. Witvliet, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Calvin College, and Calvin Theological Seminary
"It is heartening to set one's eyes on Jamie Smith's bold and creative endeavor to awaken Christians, Protestants in particular, to the centrality of worship in even, nay especially, our moral lives. This thoughtful book is rightly concerned with a restoration of the Christian imagination rooted in habits of virtue."
--Vigen Guroian, University of Virginia
About the Author
James K. A. Smith (PhD, Villanova University) is professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he also holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. He is the editor of Comment magazine.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Harder work than "Desiring the Kingdom" with less reward
By Dave
I really like James K. A. Smith's work generally. I find his arguments quite convincing. This is probably because I read Alexander Schmemann's "For the Life of the World" 25 years ago and I have been steeped in an sacramental worldview ever since.
If I could give it 3.5 stars, that's about where I'd put it. This book was much harder slogging than "Desiring the Kingdom". Far too much of the book was spent laying groundwork through explicating the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu and their theoretical models of habituation and formation. In the preface, Smith notes that he had intended volumes 2 and 3 of this Cultural Liturgies series to be scholarly monographs, but due to the cross-over popularity of the first volume with pastors and educators, he had decided to broaden this appeal of this volume as well. Sadly, I don't think that he accomplished that.
The last part of this book is certainly brilliant and ties in well with the first book. Individuals not well versed in Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, and modern French philosophy may have a hard time getting to the last part of the book. I know I did.
I had hoped to find more material that I could translate pastorally and practically. I will certainly draw upon ideas in part 2 for inspiration in that regard.
43 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent work, with one (semi-significant) caveat
By Brian M. Howell
Let me start with as clear an admonition as I can: This is a book that every Christian should read. That is, everyone would benefit from the argument here, and find something to encourage his or her Christian walk. It's not a simple read - I'm not sure everyone would love it, or understand it - but this, like the first volume, Desiring the Kingdom, covers critical ground of what it means to worship, why we do what we do, or should do what we should do.
Smith's underlying argument is that human beings are feeling, emotional, affective beings, shaped and molded by our actions and arts. He pushes against the dominant intellectualist, "world view" approach to the Christian life that says our doctrines and knowledge are the bedrock on which faithful Christian life exists or from which action inevitably flows. In this second volume of a planned three volume set, Smith focuses on the practices of worship, and how worship serves (or should serve) as a set of, context for, and arrangement of practices that orient us as individuals and communities towards loving, serving and knowing God.
As a cultural anthropologist teaching at a Christian college, these have been the waters in which I have been swimming for a long time, and I am profoundly grateful for a text that makes this point so wonderfully. I am particularly appreciative of Smith's extensive use of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, an anthropologist and social theorist I have also found enormously helpful in my own research and teaching on Christian life. I've had my students read his first book, and would likely assign this one as well, as it brings this complex theory into helpful dialog with Christian practice and story, rendering the argument relatively accessible; as accessible as I think it could be without losing its power to convince.
After reading the first volume, Desiring the Kingdom, I eagerly looked forward to this volume, but I had also hoped it would address a gap in the first one. Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically given the purpose of the text, this one also fails to think deeply about cultural diversity. As well as Smith addresses mainstream U.S. consumer and media culture, he does not give us much to think about in terms of the varieties of cultural traditions present in the church. Toward the end of the book, for example, he returns to a trenchant critique (present in both volumes) on the tendency of the (White) U.S. American church to separate form and content, viewing the gospel to be merely a "message" to be communicated by whatever means most compelling. He points to historic (European) liturgies as antidotes or correctives, and I agree with this view, yet it strikes me that he missed one of the more powerful examples of the church pushing back on a separation (or distinction with) form and meaning, the African American church tradition. In the black community today, to speak of someone as a "church person" is to remark on far more than church attendance, but to index their whole being - dress, language, tastes. Unlike the white church, who today tend to ape the musical style of the moment, the black church has created the artists shaping the world outside the church; these artists are cultivated, in voice, manner, and body, in the church, and bring these sensibilities to performances on "American Idol" and the Apollo Theater (often in a highly twisted form, but recognizable.) The black church, unlike the evangelical white church, seems better able to stand apart as a prophetic voice of the wider culture, resisting temptations to bring casual flip-flops, Twitter feeds and corny dramas into the Sunday service, instead holding to a story of the gospel told through the suffering and salvation of a people held up by the hand of God through some of the worst the world had to offer. While certainly not perfect, nor monolithic, black Christian traditions know who they are, and shape their people for life beyond the Sunday service in powerful ways.
In addition, the black church has never struggled to bring emotion into the context of worship the way white liturgies have. Smith addresses head on the tension some might have at his argument that humans are more emotional than intellectual with the predominantly emotionless practices of many Euro-American congregations. He notes at several points that the rituals of liturgy often seem dry or unappealing to those conditioned by the mall and movie theater to receive instant stimulation and personal gratification. He rightly pushes back on this perception, noting that the repetition of "dry" liturgy is part of the genius of shaping a person into a member of a holy communion, often apart from any particular "understanding" of what's happening.
Yet ritual theorists note that while part of the power of ritual is in the pattern and repetition, changing elements of ritual serves to highlight elements of the experience in powerful ways. This is, as Smith himself notes, part of the impetus for making church look like a mall, or a rave, or a night club, believing (wrongly, he says) that such forms can bring all the fun, but just be filled with a Jesus message. But the form, he argues, carries a logic of its own, that works again, and more powerfully, than the mentions of Jesus or the prayer at the beginning of the "concert." Such borrowing, he avers, undermines the integrity of the bodily practices shaped by the traditions and life of the church. I would suggest, however, that a white congregation "borrowing" gospel music is a very different thing from them "borrowing" the sound of the Rolling Stones or Katy Perry in an attempt to be "relevant." Instead, for many in the white church (or anyone not accustomed to it), a gospel choir raises the emotional temperature, and disrupts the ritual in a productive way, moving many into practices that are dramatically embodied, gospel centered and, perhaps, a bit uncomfortable. This can, and I would say, does serve the very purposes argued by Smith.
This raises a question for the whole church: how might the traditions of cultures outside ourselves push us towards postures we currently can't imagine? While the substance of Smith's argument in this volume is exactly right, he leaves out a tremendously important conversation about the ways social power, race and culture are "performed" in the context of church in ways that can work for or against the gospel. Bringing traditions into worship from outside the dominant cultural traditions of a congregation should be a vital part of re-forming the people of God as a single body, under one Lord and one baptism. It can alert us to the ways we live our lives unaware of the differences around us. It can bring into our worship practices a sensitivity to the diversity of the body of Christ in every sense of the term "diversity." (NB: I would argue this to be true for all congregations, not only Euro-Americans.)
This shortcoming notwithstanding, this is a brilliant book, and I anxiously look forward to the third volume. Smith has done us a tremendous service by bringing philosophy and cultural anthropology into such a productive conversation with the most practical aspects of Christian life. As we eagerly wait for the third volume, I hope there might be something there to help us think about how our Imagining of the Kingdom needs to occur in multiple languages.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Tell a story that captures hearts
By E. Ritzema
Imagining the Kingdom is the second volume of a projected trilogy by James K.A. Smith called Cultural Liturgies. In the first book, Desiring the Kingdom (which I have not read, but Smith gets the reader up to speed in the early parts of this book), Smith argued that humans are primarily shaped more by the imagination than the intellect. It is the stories we inhabit, and not the arguments we believe, that give our lives purpose. In other words, "we don't think our way through to action; much of our action is not the outcome of rational deliberation and conscious choice. Much of our action is not `pushed' by ideas or conclusions; rather, it grows out of our character and is in a sense `pulled' out of us by our attraction to a telos." We are shaped by the liturgies that tell attractive (not attractive in the sense of "pleasant," but rather "resonant") stories and fuel our imaginations, whether those liturgies are secular or religious: "Through a vast repertoire of secular liturgies we are quietly assimilated to the earthly city of disordered loves.... So we toddle off to church or Bible study week after week ... without realizing that we spend the rest of the week making bread for idols (Jer. 7:18)."
In this book, Smith looks specifically at what that insight means for the practices of worship and Christian education. The book comes in two parts. In part 1, the theoretical part of the book, Smith walks the reader through expositions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu, asking what their theoretical models of how we are formed might mean for how we worship. In part 2, the practical part, Smith talks explicitly about how the theory discussed in part 1 reframes Christian formation and gives a fresh understanding of how worship works.
Smith intentionally pitches this book to be accessible to both worship practitioners and the academy, meaning that one audience will think there are too many footnotes, and the other will think there are not enough.
It is an enjoyable and thought-provoking (as well as, it is hoped, practice-provoking) read. Throughout, Smith attempts to practice what he preaches by telling his readers stories that enable them to imagine what he is talking about. One of my favorites comes early in the book, when he talks about the disconnect between thought and action he experienced when he was reading (and approving) the agrarian writer Wendell Berry while sitting in a Costco.
But since the ultimate goal of the book is the renewal of practice, I was hoping for a bit more in part 2. How can this formation take place? What are some habits of worship that can be used to re-orient us? If we are shaped by stories, I wanted Smith to tell stories about how it has been done in a few communities. Smith points, for example, to the importance of the arts for the church, but by the end of the book I was not quite sure exactly what he meant: painting during a worship service? Liturgical dance? Preach stories instead of sermons? Although I deeply resonated with the argument of Imagining the Kingdom, I think there is a danger--like reading Wendell Berry in Costco--of reading, agreeing, and yet not understanding how to get to the place Smith is pointing us to. Perhaps Smith plans on doing more of this in volume three.
Note: Thanks to Baker Academic for a review copy of this book. I was not asked to give a positive review.
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