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
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...
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.
A virtue is a disposition that inclines us to achieve the good for which we are made.
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.
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...
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...
When the Scriptures are read in the context of gathered worship, they are, in a sense, enacted at the same time.
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...
So we don’t shuttle between the jurisdictions of two kingdoms; we live in the seasons of contested rule, where the principalities and powers continue to grasp after an authority that has been taken fr...
For every week that we celebrate the Eucharist is another week that the kingdom and its feast have not yet fully arrived.
Every political theology is exorcising demons—the question is which demons.
We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love.
There is no politics that isn’t ultimately religious.
Second, the shared recitation of the Creed constitutes us as a historical people.