InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
Smith’s “core claim . . . is that liturgies—whether ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. . . . [i.e.,] liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love” (25)Read more…
Truly the church is an apologetic in which one is renewed and transformed by God as part of a people living in a disciplined, liturgical community (28-30, 25, 99) across particular times and places to interact with “the lens of an interpretive framework governed by ultimate beliefs” through the Scriptures by the sanctification of the Spirit (54-56).Read more…
Discipleship, becoming Christ-like, empowered by the Spirit to image God to the world is not magic. Nor is it merely intellectual. It’s a matter of re-forming our loves, re-narrativing our identities, re-habituating our virtue. And that is centered in the practices ofRead more…
Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works is the second in a series of three books on cultural liturgies. Click here for a review of the first in the series, i.e., Desiring the Kingdom. In this volume, James K.A. Smith elaborates the ideas he developed in theRead more…
Once in a while a book comes along that crystallizes the things you have been thinking and takes you further down the road. This was such a book. James K.A. Smith contends that we are primarily “desiring animals” who thinkRead more…
With the new term opening, let’s get serious with Bob Trube’s review of Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning (David I. Smith & James K.A. Smith, editors. Eerdmans, 2011) and a few bonus articles. Please feel free to commentRead more…
Probably. Last week, I addressed the question of whether graduate school was a path to certain doom. In the comments of that post, John questioned my use of statistics to show that people with Ph.D.s had relatively good job prospectsRead more…
What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for theRead more…
What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for theRead more…
Last fall Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, kicked off the academic year with a Boston Globe op-ed entitled Why are we here? Colleges ignore life’s biggest questions, and we all pay the price. In response, Comment hosted an excellentRead more…