The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, through the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love (God) takes practice.
The Godfather amounts to a visual parable of a challenge and critique that dogs the Cultural Liturgies project: while I extol the formative power of historic Christian worship practices, it would seem...
Rather, the offering is an expression of gratitude. It is a symbolic but concrete indication that the commerce between God and humanity is not a contract but a covenant, which traffics not in commodit...
One could say of Augustine what Leslie Jamison notes about Don Gately in Infinite Jest: He’s no saint. That’s why he made salvation seem possible.
Lyotard. The assertion that postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives is ultimately a claim to be affirmed by the church, pushing us to recover (a) the narrative character of Christian faith,...
In contrast, right here in Christian worship we see a very different understanding of the good: humanity and all of creation flourish when they are rightly ordered to a telos that is not of their own...
In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin makes this point with a Tocquevillian accent: in many ways the ideal of a pluralistic liberal society has lived off the borrowed (formative) capital of illiberal...
How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity.
Here is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-’60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early Ame...
Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus—this inextricable link between imagina...
God can throw down nations and plant new ones with a few drops of water.
First, with apologies for repeating the obvious, it is worth noting that the practice of Christian worship takes up and involves something mundane, common, and even dirty (as in filthy lucre): the nit...
First, lest we pass too quickly over the mundane and obvious, we should appreciate that the stuff of the Lord’s Supper—the elements as they’re sometimes called—are rather ho-hum stuff: bread and wine,...
First, baptism is a rite of initiation into a people that at the same time effects the constitution of a people.
Discipleship, we might say, is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love.
Christian discipleship is the shape of what it means to be a renewed human being and constitutes a restoration of the gift and call of being human that was given and announced in the Garden of Eden.
As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral. In this respect, ancient wisdom about spiritual disciplines intersects with conte...
As James Davison Hunter has commented, There have never been ‘generic’ values.52 The issue is a kind of sources of the self53 concern: Does a secularized, post-Christian, increasingly antireligious so...
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry captures this well: 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 immen...
An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means...