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)?
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 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...
Finally, as we prepare to hear the Word proclaimed, a prayer for illumination positions and challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reason.
Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 NIV
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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.
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 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
What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?