Like Desiring the Kingdom, this book is something of a hybrid, pitched between the academy and the church, since its argument is aimed at both. That means, of course, that it’s also doomed to fall between the cracks and end up disappointing both: too scholastic for practitioners and too colloquial for scholars. I’ve decided that I’m willing to risk the ire of both in order to not give up on either. But given that this will pose different challenges for different readers, permit me to offer a little instructional guide for different (though related) audiences.
For Practitioners
The ultimate telos of the Cultural Liturgies project is the renewal of practice, so in many ways practitioners are my ultimate audience. You are Christian educators, pastors, worship leaders, campus ministers, and those involved in worship arts. You are reflective about your ministry and teaching and are open to new models and metaphors and theories. But you are not looking for “theory for theory’s sake.” So in some ways, this book asks a lot of you. In particular, the first half of the book asks you to wade through expositions of French theorists (Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu) while I lay the foundations for a liturgical anthropology. I can completely understand if you find yourself at times impatient in this section of the book. However, I do believe the heavy lifting in part 1 is essential for the more tangible discussion in part 2. You might look at part 1 as digging a theoretical well from which we’ll then drink in part 2. Or think of part 1 as furnishing a theoretical toolbox for reconsidering and reappreciating the how and the why of worship and liturgical formation—and, more generally, the implications for Christian education and Christian formation. Both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu offer theoretical models of habituation and formation that are suggestive, provocative, and at some points poetic. Rather than simply plunder them for juicy quotes, I have provided an exposition of their work that develops the context and “big picture” of their proposals, which should help you see just how and why I think their work has implications for a vision of Christian formation and education. But feel free to skip the footnotes.
I have tried to do a couple of things to help earn your patience in part 1. First, at various points I have paused to raise some questions about the implications of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu for how we think about the practices of Christian worship. I hope you’ll find these to be little rest stops on a long road of theoretical reflection—contemplative pauses for thinking about how a phenomenology of embodiment begins to hit the ground for worship planning and liturgical formation. Consider them promissory notes that are then more fully explored in part 2. Second, I have continued to employ various creative asides to help illustrate their arguments and theories, drawing on film and literature. I hope these are interspersed such that just as your eyes begin to glaze over from absorbing the intricacies of phenomenology, you’ll hit upon a reflection on Rise of the Planet of the Apes that refreshes your energy and attention.
Part 2 should then be “your” section of the book—the place where we’ll explore the specific implications of a liturgical anthropology for an understanding of Christian worship and formation. Granted, part 2 is no how-to manual. While I hope it hews closer to practical concerns, it does so in a reflective mode and with big-picture concerns in mind. My goal in part 2 is to suggest how the philosophical analyses of “being-in-the-world” in part 1 reframes how we look at matters of formation and generate a new appreciation of how worship works. This should encourage a new kind of critical concern about the force and formative power of secular liturgies. But it should also encourage a new intentionality about Christian worship and worship planning. In turn, it should generate new intentionality about the shape of a distinctly Christian pedagogy in education. In both cases, I hope the argument and analyses of Imagining the Kingdom provide further depth and nuance to the central argument of Desiring the Kingdom.
For Scholars
This book is decidedly not a scholarly monograph—because of both its tone and its telos (which is ultimately the renewal of Christian practice). Nonetheless, I do think embedded in here are some original, constructive proposals that might advance conversations in philosophy of religion. Indeed, implicit in my argument is a research agenda for both philosophy of religion and sociology of religion.
In particular, I would invite scholars to read my engagement with Merleau-Ponty as a foray into the continuing conversation between French phenomenology and philosophy of religion. That conversation, which has drawn on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and others, has largely been a philosophy of God—concerned with themes of revelation, alterity, transcendence, “appearance,” and so forth. This is a robust and important trajectory of research. However, it has not fostered a phenomenology of religion—a phenomenological analysis of religious practice. I hope the model sketched here contributes to a growing conversation at the intersection of philosophy and liturgy, perhaps even to the emergence of a philosophy of liturgy.[7] The liturgical anthropology sketched here also has implications for the social sciences, particularly social-scientific accounts of religion and religious phenomena.[8]
Some of the arguments and analyses here in Imagining the Kingdom could have been distilled in scholarly articles for relevant journals in the guild—and I may still pursue some trajectories of research in more specialized conversations. But for now I have chosen to embed the scholarly proposals in this hybrid book. So to my scholarly colleagues, I ask for your patience with some of the asides that follow. I would also appreciate your attention to the footnotes: I’ve pushed down some matters of detail into a sort of parallel conversation on the bottom of the page. I’d ask you to remember that, at points, I have had to forgo some qualifications and nuance for the sake of a wider audience. Significant literatures that I have engaged do not appear in the footnotes below—including, no doubt, some works you consider “essential.” I’d like to invite you to read this book as a phenomenological exercise in returning to “the things themselves” and ask that you evaluate the argument on the basis of what it says rather than what it leaves out.