The core claim of this book is that liturgies8—whether sacred or secular—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In shor...
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...
One of the responsibilities of the pastor as political theologian, then, is to help the people of God read the festivals of their own polis, whether the annual militarized Thanksgiving festivals that...
Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably a...
In short, music and song seem to stand as packed microcosms of what it means to be human.
In fact, I must tell you that in the past couple years I’ve become convinced that perhaps nothing is so important for our walk with the Lord as good friends. I think God gives us good friends as sacra...
In Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise plays chronicler to the antics of the star of the story, Dean Moriarty, who is really the exemplar, the hero, the model. So just c...
If liturgy forms us by conforming us to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29), then why are Christians so often conformed to the world (per Rom. 12:2)?
However, in looking back at the enthusiasm of my younger, newly Calvinist self, I also cringe at the rough edges of my spiritual hubris – an especially ugly vice. The simple devotion of my brothers an...
How strange that discovering the doctrines of grace should translate into haughty self-confidence and a notable lack of charity.
How does that happen? I’m suggesting that Christian education has, for too long, been concerned with information rather than formation; thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a...
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.
Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while also recognizing the eschatological distance between the now and the...
But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence...
Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind o...
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...
And when our songs attribute the action of worship to us (Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down . . .), then worship is understood as fundamentally an expression of human will, a Pelagian endeav...
Worship is not primarily a venue for innovative creativity but a place for discerning reception and faithful repetition. That