Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (2013) James K. A. Smith
Baker Academic, 191 pages
ISBN 9780801035784
Please don’t let the name of the publisher - Baker Academic - keep you from reading this marvelous book. Also don’t let the fact that this is the second book in the Cultural Liturgies trilogy keep you from reading it. (Much of the first book is summarized in this second volume.) I hope you will read it. I won’t deny that the book is challenging; it is, yet it is also enormously rewarding.
Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, states that we are defined not so much by what we know as by what we love. What we love, we worship. Those loves are shaped by many things, among them formative practices, or liturgies, both religious and secular. We’re all hardwired to worship someone or something.
Smith uses Scripture, the writings of Calvin, Augustine, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, Wendell Berry, David Foster Wallace, poetry, and films such as The King’s Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and many other resources to make his points.
All of this is enormously thought-provoking reading as you consider the implications not only for local worship, but also for education and ministry. I also greatly appreciated how Smith suggests a renewed place for the arts in Christian worship and thought, how the arts can bear witness to the gospel and allow the Spirit to work.
I hope you will take on the challenge of reading this book. I think after reading it you will not look at worship in quite the same way.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
(Note: Imagining the Kingdom is not yet in the Resource Center, but should be sometime in April.)
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