Pascal knew that Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.
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...
God can throw down nations and plant new ones with a few drops of water.
For example: never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view,...
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...
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.
Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and prac...
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...
Worship is not primarily a venue for innovative creativity but a place for discerning reception and faithful repetition. That
Too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.
The postmodern critique is not aimed at metanarratives because they are really grounded in narratives; on the contrary, the problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic g...
So too we extend mutual greetings because God has welcomed us.
Education is most fundamentally a matter of formation,
Baptism signifies a radical reordering of the social world in Christ precisely because it signifies that the priesthood is open to all
You can’t just think your way to new hungers. While Pollan and Berry may have successfully recruited my intellect, their books couldn’t change my habits. Such rehabituation was going to require a whol...
You can't think your way into new hungers.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
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 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?