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...
Focusing on the intellectual artifacts of the earthly polis, we miss the formative power of its rituals. This is the inconvenient truth that is pressed upon us by the new black theology of Willie Jenn...
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,...
Finally, as we prepare to hear the Word proclaimed, a prayer for illumination positions and challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reason.
But one of the dangers of eagerly diving in to the political sphere is that it tends to underestimate the strength of the currents already swirling around in that sphere. In other words, such Pylesque...
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...
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...
All habits and practices are ultimately trying to make us into a certain kind of person. So one of the most important questions we need to ask is: Just what kind of person is this habit or practice tr...
Acknowledging the interpreted status of the gospel should translate into a certain humility in our public theology. It should not, however, translate into skepticism about the truth of the Christian c...
A sacramental understanding of the world is simply a shorthand way of describing the psalmist’s claim that The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it (Ps. 24:1)...
What does it look like to bear witness in a secular age? What does it look like to be faithful? To what extent have Christians unwittingly absorbed the tendencies of this world? On the one hand, this...
We should emphasize that the narrative of Scripture is a primary fund for the Christian imagination.
The end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people.
Singing is a full-bodied action that activates the whole person—or at least more of the whole person than is affected by merely sitting and passively listening, or even reading and reciting texts.
You won’t be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn’t deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead,
You might have Bible verses on the wall in every room of the house and yet the unspoken rituals reinforce self-centeredness rather than sacrifice. Thus
Third, the recitation of the Creed is the I believe moment in Christian worship.
