Hoping to find a language for death. In his hands, the language of death is democratic — which makes good sense since death is quite impartial (talk about e pluribus unum!).
Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the hea...
What we believe is not a matter of intellectualizing salvation but rather a matter of knowing what to love, knowing to whom we pledge allegiance, and knowing what is at stake for us as people of the b...
What makes them religious is not just that they are informed by beliefs and worldviews but that they have formative pretensions that are nothing short of liturgical. It shouldn’t be surprising when an...
What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds?
What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely the success of consumer culture — the stronger form of magic found in the ever-new glow of consumer products
We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts
Too many readers regularly overestimate Augustine’s affirmation here and seem to regularly ignore his persistent affirmation that justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient Cit...
Todd Billings has articulated the dynamics of theological interpretation in a way that resonates with my account of Derrida’s emphasis on context and communal criteria for what constitutes a good inte...
Through his embedded experience in the Montgomery bus boycotts, Reverend King came to see the limits of Niebuhr’s abstract public theologizing. Abstractions cannot empower acts of compassion and sacri...
Those formed by such liturgies then become the kind of people who pursue and desire that end. So if we are unreflectively immersed in the liturgies of consumerism, we will, over time, learn that the e...
This dependence and lack of self-sufficiency is then often affirmed horizontally, as it were, by encouraging the congregation to greet one another, expressing welcome
Third, following from this, the liturgical practice of the offering indicates that Christian worship—which is a foretaste of the new creation—embodies a new economy, an alternative economy.
The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion; if someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them. Because what’s usually captured the person is not scien...
The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological insti...
The soul therefore needs three things: eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing.
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our --our goal, our end. But the we live toward is not something we primarily know or believe or think about; rat...
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 liturgy is a hearts and minds strategy, a pedagogy that trains us as disciples precisely by putting our bodies through a regimen of repeated practices that get a hold of our heart and aim or love...
The core claim of this book is that liturgies[ 8]—whether sacred or secular—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In s...