FRIENDSHIP AS TIME TRAVEL

'If you want to transcend time, build friendships across generations. Though you can't stand outside your own season, you can hear from those who've lived through your season. In my experience this is one of the great gifts of multigenerational friendships. Friendship in this respect is akin to time travel...if we can relinquish the myth of utter singularity, then listening to those generations ahead of us is a way of learning from our future. Granted it is the nature of youth to spurn such gifts. But when we are humbled, friendship across the generations becomes a lifeline, an almost sacramental means of transcending the purview of our now as God gives us an outside glimpse of our moment. But the gifts traverse time both ways. Older generations attentively listening to those younger avail themselves of different ears to hear what's whispering or shouting now.'

James KA Smith in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.113.

THE FATHER LOVE OF GOD

'At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father. Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says "I've been waiting for you."' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.201. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INHABITING A STORY

'To be without a story is to live without any type of script that might help us know who we are and what we're about. We flail and meander. We frantically try on roles and identities to see if they fit. To be character-ized by a story is to have a name, a backstory, a project - all of which serve as rails to run on, something stable and given that we count on. We can be known because there's someone to know.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.163. 

THE FUTILITY OF IDOLATRY

'...the problem with idolatry is that it is an exercise in futility, a penchant that ends in profound dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Idolatry, we might say doesn't "work" - which is why it creates restless hearts. In idolatry we are enjoying what we're supposed to be using. We are treating as ultimate what is only penultimate; we are heaping infinite, immortal expectations on created things that will pass away; we are settling on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through to its Creator.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.82. 

TRUE FREEDOM MEANS DEPENDENCE

'...the irony: my freedom of choice brings me to the point where I need someone else to give me a will that is actually free. And not merely free to choose - since that's what got me here in the first place - be free to choose the good. If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence. Coming to end of myself is the realization that I'm dependent on someone other than myself if I'm going to be truly free.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.66. 

WHEN YOUR FREEDOM TO BE THE PERSON YOU WANT TO BE IS LIMITED BY YOURSELF

'It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you're the only one standing in your way - to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the "you" you've made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over again and over again. After the thrill of independence and experiments in self-actualization, drinking your so called "potential for Being" to the dregs, when the exhaustion starts to set in and then eventually morphs into a kind of self-disgust, you can reach a point where you know you want a different life but are enchained to the one you've made.'  

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.64. 

CONVERSION DEFINED

'Conversion is not an arrival at our final destination; its the acquisition of a compass.'
James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts, p.50. 

WHAT BAPTISM TEACHES US ABOUT FAMILIES

'Our promises in baptism - as parents and congregation - signal that what counts as "family" is not just the closed, nuclear unit that is so often idolized as "the family." Thus, if Christian congregations are truly going to live out of and into the significance of baptism, they will need to become communities in which the bloodlines of kin are trumped by the blood of Christ - where "natural" families don't fold into themselves in self-regard.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.116. 

OUR HEARTS

'Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.91. 

VIRTUES

'...a virtue is a disposition that inclines us to achieve the good for which we are made.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.89. 

THE POWER OF HABIT

'...there is no formation without repetition. Virtue formation takes practice, and there is no practice that isn't repetitive. We willingly embrace repetition as a good in all kinds of other sectors of our life - to hone our golf swing, our piano prowess, and our mathematical abilities, for example. If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth.'  

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.80. 

CORPORATE WORSHIP

'Instead of the bottom up emphasis on worship as our expression of devotion and praise, historic Christian worship is rooted in the conviction that God is the primary actor or agent in the worship encounter. Worship works from the top down, you might say. In worship we don't just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (ree)makes us and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn't just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.76. 

CONTEXTUALISATION GONE WRONG

'...when we distill the gospel message and embed it in the form of the mall, while we might think we are finding a fresh way for people to encounter Christ, in fact the very form of the practice is already loaded with a way of constructing the world. The liturgy of the mall is a heart-level education in consumerism that construes everything as a commodity available to make me happy. When I encounter "Jesus" in such a liturgy, rather than encountering the living Lord of history, I am implicitly being taught that Jesus is one more commodity available to make me happy. And while I might eagerly want to add him to my shelf of stuff, we shouldn't confuse this appropriation with discipleship.'

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.76. 

HYPOCRISY DEFINED

'I was reading Wendell Berry in the food court at CostCo.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.60. 

NOT ALL SINS ARE DECISIONS

'...not all sins are decisions. Because we tend to be intellectualists who assume that we are thinking things, we construe temptation and sin accordingly: we think temptation is an intellectual reality, where some idea is presented to us that we then think about and make a conscious choice to pursue (or not). But once you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you'll then realize that temptation isn't just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it's often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren't just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices. And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires re habituation, a reformation of our loves.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.54. 

PASTORS AS ETHNOGRAPHERS

'Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and too often deformantive.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.40. 

CONFESSION IN WORSHIP

'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 intentions. The practices of Christian worship are a tangible, practiced, re-formative way to address this tension and gap.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.30. 

THE POWER OF OUR IDOLS

'Our idolatries...are more liturgical than theological. Our most alluring idols are less intellectual inventions and more affective projections - they are the fruit of disordered wants, not just misunderstandings or ignorance.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.23. 

OUR LONGINGS ORIENTATE US

'To be human is to be animated and orientated by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as "flourishing." And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. We are orientated by our longings, directed by our desires. We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we "think through" our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, p.11. 

SIN

'...sin is not only personal and individual (a violation of a relationship); it also becomes inscribed into the cultural institutions of our human making (a refusal of our commission to be God's vice-regents). Culture-making - unfolding the latent possibilities that have been folded into creation - is a vocation given to us as image bearers of God. Just as the Fall means not that we stop desiring but rather that our desire becomes disordered, so too sin does not mean that we stop being culture makers; rather, it means that we do this poorly, sinfully, unjustly.'

James KA Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.178.