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.
Liturgy, as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation....
In short, music and song seem to stand as packed microcosms of what it means to be human.
In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.
In other words, the public practices of the empire are idolatrous practices because embedded in them is a very different telos, a rival version of the kingdom. The political refuses to remain penultim...
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)?
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...
For Lyotard, metanarratives are a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories that not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal stories do this) but also claim to be able to legitim...
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.
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...
Because when the thin gruel of do-it-yourself spirituality turns out to be isolating, lonely, and unable to endure crises, the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd might find itself surprisingly open to...
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 Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed.7 You can’t not bet your life on something. You can’t not be headed somewhere. We live le...
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...