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. Now
Even the secularist is pressed by a sense of something more — some fullness that wells up within (or presses down upon) the managed immanent frame we’ve constructed in modernity.
This knitting of song into our bodies is why memorization of Scripture through song is often so effective. Song soaks into the very core of our being, which is why music is an important constitutive e...
Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).
Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us.
Theology must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God’s saving power; you leave people enslaved where they ought to be set f...
The tangible display and performance of the gospel in the Lord’s Supper is a deeply affecting practice.
Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui.
It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly express these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble...
If you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit. This means that our most fundamental orientation to the world—the longings and desires that orient us toward some version of the...
Scripture also functions as something like the constitution of the baptismal city.
In strange, often unintended ways, the pursuit of justice, shalom, and a holistic gospel can have its own secularizing effect. What begins as a gospel-motivated concern for justice can turn into a nat...
Foucault. The seemingly disturbing, even Nietzschean claim that power is knowledge should push us to realize what MTV learned long ago: (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b...
For every week that we celebrate the Eucharist is another week that the kingdom and its feast have not yet fully arrived.
Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world...
What we sing says something significant about who we are—and whose we are.
The Creator in whom we find our rest is only all too eager to welcome us into communion.
A virtue is a disposition that inclines us to achieve the good for which we are made.
Worship again and again interrupts the course of the world. Through worship the Christian community testifies that the world is not on its own. And this also means that it is not kept alive by politic...
Second, the shared recitation of the Creed constitutes us as a historical people.