James K. A. Smith

You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the "imagination station" that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship. Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom, Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that book's content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smith's popular presentations on the ideas in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life.

The Spiritual Power of Habit

You Are What You Love

Sean Wilson

This was quite a solid book. The principles Smith discusses (most centrally, his critique of what he calls "thinking-thingism") were almost uniformly excellent, and once you start seeing your worship, your work, your family life in terms of what it is directing your heart to love, you can't unsee it.

That said, the applications and illustrations were a bit of a mixed bag. He does at times set didactic teaching against liturgical formation, which is an overstatement. I'd like to have seen him address how the liturgical environment creates an appropriate context for "thinking" things like preaching, lectures, catechism, Scripture reading and memorisation, et cetera. (He evidently isn't against didactic teaching: he saw fit to compose a book, not an interpretive dance.)

The applications to children's and youth-ministry were most interesting to me, albeit the most provocative. Smith argues well about the effect that "thinking-thingism" has on our raising up of young people. One of the most important things we can do for children (especially small children, whose ability to learn didactically is still developing) is to place them in environments where they learn habits, dispositions, and their belonging to the Christian community.

And the vision of shalom he wants to encourage the reader to adopt is let down by the "faithful presence"/pious loser missiology he adopts from James Davison Hunter. But there's no point throwing around words like "transformative" and "restorative" if you don't want to transform or restore anything too much.

The strongest parts of the book, though, are very strong, and I highly recommend it.

You Are What You Love The Spiritual Power of Habit

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