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...
A song gets absorbed into our imagination in a way that mere texts rarely do.
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)...
A reordering of creation has already broken into creation in the person of Jesus Christ, and we are gathering as a people in order to practice for the arrival of the kingdom in its fullness—and thus i...
Too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.5
Your love or desire—aimed at a vision of the good life that shapes how you see the world while also moving and motivating you—is operative on a largely nonconscious level. Your love is a kind of autom...
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,
To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward a destination of your dreams. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: You have to wager. It is n...
Third, the church’s music and songs constitute what Richard Mouw describes as a compacted theology.
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our
The doubter’s doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.
The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do—that the devices and desires of our hearts outstrip our best intent...
Marsh goes on to observe: The boycott year had renewed the mission of the church. The boycott showed the world a church whose power stemmed from its deliberate discipline, whose moral authority was th...
It’s not meaning, and it’s certainly not meaning in general, he says. Indeed, there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific...
In contrast, right here in Christian worship we see a very different understanding of the good: humanity and all of creation flourish when they are rightly ordered to a telos that is not of their own...
Implicit in Christian worship is a vision not just for spiritual flourishing but also for human flourishing; this is not just practice for eternal bliss; it is training for temporal, embodied human co...
I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction f...
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...
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...
Finally, as we prepare to hear the Word proclaimed, a prayer for illumination positions and challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reason.