Notes

Preface

[1]. That it is not a performative contradiction should be a signal to some critics of Desiring the Kingdom: obviously my argument and model do not denigrate intellectual or theoretical reflection in favor of some unthinking, uncritical practice. Desiring the Kingdom is itself a theoretical reflection on pretheoretical realities—it is an invitation to reflect on our embodied being-in-the-world as an impetus both to appreciate the power of affective formation and to re-enter practice differently, even with a new intentionality. I return to these matters in the final section of chap. 4, “Redeeming Reflection.”

[2]. Marcel Proust, On Art and Literature, 1896–1919, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997), 19.

[3]. Ibid., 22. “Compared with this past [i.e., the past evoked by the scent of a madeleine dipped in tea], this private essence of ourselves,” Proust continues, “the truths of intellect seem scarcely real at all” (24).

[4]. Ibid., 25. I should note that Proust is criticizing the literary critic Sainte-Beuve, whom we might now describe anachronistically, following Charles Taylor, as an “intellectualist” critic guilty of the “heresy of paraphrase.” Much more on this in the chapters below. I discuss the “heresy of paraphrase in more detail in chap. 4 below, in the section titled “Redeeming Ritual.”

[5]. Ibid., 25 (emphasis added).

[6]. Ibid., 25–26.

How to Read This Book

[7]. This is part of what Nicholas Wolterstorff sees as the “prospect” for philosophy of religion in “Analytic Philosophy of Religion: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Inquiring about God: Selected Essays, ed. Terence Cuneo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1:17–34. Consider also Steven Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), or Terence Cuneo’s philosophical analysis of icons in worship in “If These Walls Could Only Speak,” Faith and Philosophy 27 (2010): 123–41. For a consideration of trajectories in philosophy of religion that take liturgical practice seriously, see James K. A. Smith, “Philosophy of Religion Takes Practice: Liturgy as Source and Method in Philosophy of Religion,” in Contemporary Practice and Method in the Philosophy of Religion: New Essays, ed. David Cheetham and Rolfe King (London: Continuum, 2008), 133–47. See also Jean-Yves Lacoste’s parallel development of a kind of liturgical phenomenology as seen, for instance, in Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2004). Or consider Lacoste’s phenomenology of prayer in “Liturgy and Coaffection,” trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, in The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response, ed. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005), 93–103. For a helpful introduction to Lacoste’s project, see Joseph Rivera, “Toward a Liturgical Existentialism,” New Blackfriars (2012): 1–18.

[8]. For a sketch of the implications for sociology of religion, see James K. A. Smith, “Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a ‘Post-Secular’ Sociology of Religion,” in The Post-Secular in Question, ed. Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 159–84. I also think there is a conversation to be staged between my liturgical phenomenology—which includes an analysis of “secular liturgies”—and British discussions of “implicit religion” and “secular faith.” See Edward Bailey, Implicit Religion: An Introduction (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998); Bailey, Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society (1996; repr., Leuven: Peeters, 2006), and Bailey, The Secular Faith Controversy: Religion in Three Dimensions (London: Continuum, 2001). On a more popular level, consider Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

Introduction: A Sentimental Education: On Christian Action

[9]. Matthew Myer Boulton, Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 226.

[10]. As Rodney Clapp notes, “The grace of God is not something we naturally recognize. It is not a theory pieced together from naturally observed phenomena. It is instead the result of God’s reaching out to us in mercy. It is through our acceptance and participation in that mercy that we are given the categories of creation, world, sin, reconciliation, and kingdom of God—the categories by which we claim to see ‘reality’ as it really is.” “The Church as Worshiping Community: Welcome to the (Real) World,” in A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 97.

[11]. “Through worship God trains his people to take the right things for granted.” Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “The Gift of the Church and the Gifts God Gives It,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 25.

[12]. See John D. Witvliet, “The Cumulative Power of Transformation in Public Worship: Cultivating Gratitude and Expectancy for the Holy Spirit’s Work,” in Worship That Changes Lives: Multidisciplinary and Congregational Perspectives on Spiritual Transformation, ed. Alexis Abernathy (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 41–58.

[13]. On the seemingly paradoxical notion of “secular liturgies,” see James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 88n20.

[14]. While I will very briefly rehearse the argument of Desiring the Kingdom in this introduction, for the most part this book assumes familiarity with that first volume.

[15]. See Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006).

[16]. Cf. Calvin Seerveld, Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves (Toronto: Tuppence, 2000).

[17]. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008). Of course, thinking is also a kind of doing, and reflection is crucial to intentional action. My point is not that we should do less thinking but rather that our action and “culture-making” is always already driven by more than what we “think.”

[18]. As J. Todd Billings well summarizes, “To act in communion with God—to obey the law—is to be truly and fully human.” Billings, Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 110.

[19]. See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 205–7.

[20]. Note the directionality here: Christian action is predicated on Christian communion. So Christian action is not “our” independent, heroic effort. Billings gets at this in the context of a discussion of Franciscus Junius’s discussion of different “degrees, or dimensions, of divine grace in regeneration.” Both justification and sanctification are “received as gifts in ‘communion with Christ’: it is not that justification is a gift and sanctification is an achievement. However, a distinct yet inseparable dimension of this union with Christ is ‘the action emanating from the new creation,’ the Spirit-empowered activation of our lives for love of God and neighbor” (ibid., 108, citing Franciscus Junius, De libero hominis arbitrio, ante et post lapsum, in W. J. van Asselt, J. M. Bac, and R. T. te Velde, eds., Reformed Thought on Freedom [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010], 106). My project in this book is to build on this claim by showing how the Spirit empowers us to so act, through an account of liturgically-formed habituation.

[21]. For an accessible overview of the issues here, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). For a more detailed exploration, see John A. Bargh, “Bypassing the Will: Toward Demystifying the Nonconscious Control of Social Behavior,” in The New Unconscious, ed. Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 37–58.

[22]. Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World: A Reformed Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 110.

[23]. For a more direct response to some concerns and criticisms of my argument in Desiring the Kingdom, see James K. A. Smith, “Worldview, Sphere Sovereignty, and Desiring the Kingdom: A Guide for (Perplexed) Reformed Folk,” Pro Rege 39, no. 4 (June 2011): 15–24; Smith, “From Christian Scholarship to Christian Education [Response to a Review Symposium on Desiring the Kingdom],” Christian Scholar’s Review 39 (2010): 229–32; and Smith, “Two Cheers for Worldview: A Response to Thiessen,” Journal of Education and Christian Belief 14 (2010): 55–58.

[24]. I explicitly affirm the helpfulness of “worldview” in Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010).

[25]. On such accounts, our action is thought to be the outcome of conscious, mental deliberation—the outcome of thinking about it. This is further explained in the next section.

[26]. While I am using practices of eating merely as a case study for a larger point about habituation, the specific concern with food is germane to the vision of the kingdom articulated in Scripture. For an incisive analysis, see Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[27]. Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam, 2007).

[28]. I think this is exactly the import of Tom Wolfe’s account of American higher education in his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. See Desiring the Kingdom, 118–21, for discussion.

[29]. In this context, it’s odd to be charged with some kind of anti-intellectualism, not only because I explicitly reject this on the first page of Desiring the Kingdom (17n2), but also because the book itself is not exactly a walk in the park. The entire argument of the book is a pretty rigorous engagement with a whole host of ideas, inviting the reader to think through complex theories from the likes of Heidegger, Augustine, Taylor, and Bourdieu, all in order to articulate a unique, integral Christian “perspective” on education. If the critic’s reading of Desiring the Kingdom were correct, you’d wonder why I’d ever spend time on such a venture. Perhaps that’s a clue that this is not the best way to read the book.

[30]. I grant that I’m making strong claims about primacy that might almost give the impression of a dichotomous relationship between worship and worldview; but I don’t think I ever actually make the relation dichotomous, precisely for reasons I’ve already cited. In this respect, I see the (mis)impression as analogous to one that Iain McGilchrist notes in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 6–7: “Because I am involved in redressing a balance, I may at times seem to be sceptical of the tools of analytical discourse. I hope, however, it will be obvious from what I say that I hold absolutely no brief for those who wish to abandon reason or traduce language. . . . My quarrel is only with an excessive and misplaced rationalism which has never been subjected to the judgment of reason.”

[31]. But as we’ll see in chap. 1 below, that doesn’t mean they’re not intentional. Nor are we merely talking about hardwired biological reflexes. Such habits are acquired and intentional; as Merleau-Ponty shows, they are “between” instinct and intellect.

[32]. Philosophically I locate my project in the vein of Charles Taylor’s call to “overcome epistemology” and Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of “the myth of the mental.” See Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1–19; Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005): 47–65. We will return to these themes in more detail below.

[33]. Which is precisely why we can also speak of “intellectual virtues.” For a relevant discussion, consider Ernest Sosa’s account of what he calls “two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective,” both of which are “a distinctive human accomplishment,” in A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 1.

[34]. It won’t do to dismiss this claim as “narrative theology” and thus trot out epistemic worries about realism (per Francesca Murphy, God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]). Such dismissals usually traffic in a false dichotomy: either story or “reality.” My claim about the centrality of story here is not primarily an epistemic claim, nor is it an evasion of ontological import (when I talk about “story” I’m not identifying that with “fiction”). The point is not that what we know is sequestered in a story that may or may not touch upon “reality”; rather, the point is that we know reality storiedly—and that we are wired (created) to navigate our way through the world in this way. We need to resist being distracted by worries about “reference.” Here (and, indeed, passim) I have been influenced by James Woods’s account of the novel in How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Discussing issues of “realism,” he notes: “Brigid Lowe argues that the question of fiction’s referentiality—does fiction make true statements about the world?—is the wrong one, because fiction does not ask us to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them (in an artistic sense): ‘Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that tomorrow it will be sunny. One experience is all but sensual, the other wholly abstract. When we tell a story, although we may hope to teach a lesson, our primary objective is to produce an imaginative experience’” (237, citing Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy [London: Anthem, 2007], emphasis original). What’s at issue here is the shaping and activation of plausibility structures: “Hypothetical plausibility—probability—is the important and neglected idea here: probability involves the defense of the credible imagination against the incredible. . . . It is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened” (238, emphasis original). Those fixated on the epistemic will worry about such language in connection with Christian worship; but my point is that Christian worship shapes our orientation to the world precisely by priming and calibrating our imagination. As Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells have put it, “It is in worship that we learn to take the right things for granted” (“The Gift of the Church”). Thus I might suggest, with Woods, that “‘realism’ and the technical or philosophical squabbles it has engendered seem like a school of bright red herrings” (How Fiction Works, 244).

[35]. Craig Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 63–64.

[36]. Boulton, Life in God, 227.

[37]. For further discussion of themes of ascension and union with Christ, see Laura Smit, “‘The Depth Behind Things’: Toward a Calvinist Sacramental Theology,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant and Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 205–28; Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); and J. Todd Billings, Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011).

[38]. See Desiring the Kingdom, 93n5.

[39]. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 1.

[40]. Which is precisely why we’ll learn more about these dynamics from Jane Austen than from A. J. Ayer. On Austen, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 181–87, 239–43; and Peter Leithart, Jane Austen (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010). Given the themes I’m pressing here, it is worth noting resonance with the titles of two Austen classics: Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.

[41]. This does indeed seem to be the import of Flaubert’s account of the young, impressionable Frederic Moreau, who has become someone quite different than he had intended, not because he was taught in les grand écoles but simply because he was immersed in all the sensual spaces of Parisian life. In this sense, Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is a more contemporary Sentimental Education.

[42]. Cavanaugh, in ways similar to (but predating) Charles Taylor, appeals to Benedict Anderson’s account of “social imaginaries” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). For a discussion of social imaginaries drawing on Taylor’s debt to Anderson, see Desiring the Kingdom, 63–71.

[43]. My concern here is that the imagination not be thought of primarily in terms of our autonomous abilities—an expression of what we can “come up with.” In this regard William Desmond’s critique of the modern conception of the imagination (vs. what he calls the “sacramental imagination”) is instructive: “In both Enlightenment and Romanticism we find a culture of autonomy, granting that imaginative autonomy seems more ecstatic, rational autonomy more prosaic and domestic. Nevertheless, both autonomies have to do primarily with ourselves and our powers: auto-nomos—self-law. This situation is itself equivocal. There can be an aesthetic will to power in Romantic imagination, as there can be a rationalistic will to power in Enlightenment reason.” William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005), 137. While I don’t want to consider imagination as entirely “passive” or “receptive” (I do think it is crucial that we be able to imagine the world otherwise than how we “receive” it), I do think it is important to recognize a certain responsive character of the imagination. For an account of imagination as both “synthesizer” and “innovator,” see Frank Schalow, “Methodological Elements in Heidegger’s Employment of Imagination,” Journal of Philosophical Research 23 (1998): 113–28.

[44]. I’m also rejecting the cognitivism that still plagues much of (especially analytic) philosophical accounts of the imagination as “pretense.” In particular, I reject what Shaun Nichols describes as the “single code hypothesis,” namely, the representationalist approach to imagination, which construes imagination as simply a different mode of propositional thinking. On this account, “propositional imagining involves ‘pretense representations,’” and such representations “can have exactly the same content as a belief.” The “crucial difference” between such pretense representations (of the imagination) and belief “is not given by the content of the representation. Rather, contemporary accounts of the imagination maintain that pretense representations differ from belief representations by their function” (“Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing,” Mind & Language 21 [2006]: 460, emphasis original). On this model, imagination is still considered a primarily representational phenomenon, on the same order as “beliefs.” For a classic statement, see Gregory Currie, “Pretence, Pretending, and Metarepresenting,” Mind & Language 13 (1998): 35–55. More recently, see the studies collected in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). In contrast to such propositionalizing of the imagination (a cognitivist reductionism), I’m suggesting that the imagination is a primarily affective “faculty” or mode of intentionality.

[45]. In the sense that Mark Johnson uses the term in The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); hereafter cited as MB. Johnson argues that “reason and logic grow out of our interactions in and with our environment,” navigated by our bodies, and that the imagination is tied to that embodiment (13).

[46]. I grant that this picture is a kind of empiricism, basically rearticulating the empiricist maxim nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu (nothing is in the intellect unless it has first been in the senses). However, this axiom is at least as old as Aristotle (on the imagination in De anima). Perhaps most interesting is Augustine’s allusion to this principle in Sermo Dolbeau 25: “Whatever has not entered through a sense of your body, also cannot be thought about by your mind” (glossing 1 Cor. 2:9). In Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, part 3, vol. 11, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), 367.

[47]. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. John R. Stigloe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969): “The poetic register that corresponds to the soul must therefore remain open to our phenomenological investigations” (xx). What I’m calling “imagination” here seems most akin to what Bachelard describes as the “material imagination” (distinguished from “formal imagination”).

[48]. For a related discussion, see Frank Schalow, “Imagination and Embodiment: The Task of Reincarnating the Self from a Heideggerian Perspective,” International Studies in Philosophy 36 (2004): 161–75. I’m here trying to articulate something like Francisco Varela’s notion of “enaction,” which, I take it, rejects the narrow representationalism that still tends to “regard the cognitive life of an organism as a ‘representational’ coping, where perception is primary and the main source and drive for any valid cognition.” Francisco Varela and Natalie Depraz, “Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation,” in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, ed. B. Allan Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 200. Such a picture reduces us to information processors. In contrast, “enaction implies that sensorimotor coupling modulates but does not determine an ongoing endogenous activity that it configures into meaningful world items in an unceasing flow” (ibid.). This points to the primacy of the imagination: “Ordinary perception is, to an essential degree, sensorimotor constrained imagination. Imagination is central to life itself, not a marginal or epiphenomenal side-effect of perception” (202).

[49]. John Kaag, “The Neurological Dynamics of the Imagination,” Phenomenology and Cognitive Science 8 (2009): 184–85.

[50]. Phil Kenneson, “Gathering: Worship, Formation, Imagination,” in Hauerwas and Wells, Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 56.

[51]. There is, of course, a Christian analogue to this: How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded to die as a martyr for the Christian faith? The answer is the same.

[52]. To speak of humans as liturgical or narrative “animals” is a philosophical shorthand for emphasizing our embodied, material nature (as in Aristotle’s description of human beings as “rational animals”). In this respect, Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation regarding the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas is germane to our project here. Some commentators, he notes, “have failed to ask the relevant questions about the relationship between our rationality and our animality. They have underestimated the importance of the fact that our bodies are animal bodies with the identity and continuities of animal bodies, and they have failed to recognize adequately that in this present life it is true of us that we do not merely have, but are our bodies” (Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues [Chicago: Open Court, 1999], 6). On the same page, MacIntyre extols Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a prompt to help philosophy remember our animality.

I am deeply appreciative of Eleonore Stump’s brief on behalf of the irreducibility of narrative knowledge: “The Problem of Evil: Analytic Philosophy and Narrative,” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 251–64. However, I think her account can be deepened and assisted by making the sort of connection between narrative and embodiment that is noted by Merleau-Ponty, which is my task below.

[53]. Just because this is a philosophical account does not mean that it is a naturalistic account. We are simply attending to the features and conditions of our embodiment, which are the conditions of our creaturehood that are also gifts of the Creator. To speak of creaturehood is to speak in categories of Christian theology and confession. However, this does mean that the conditions of creaturehood that make us liturgical animals are the same conditions that can make us idolatrous animals—which is precisely why Christian worship and secular liturgies both marshal the same “structure” of the human person while aiming in very different directions.

[54]. Wallace himself describes the powerful effect of literature more colorfully. For example, in a conversation with David Lipsky about Wallace’s early novel The Broom of the System, Wallace laments the novel’s fixation on theory (“It was all about the head, you know?”), which leads to a broader critique of contemporary experimental fiction as “hellaciously unfun to read.” David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 36. But then he goes on to contrast such “heady” fiction with engaging novels that evince “that kind of stomach magic of, ‘God damn, it’s fun to read. I’d rather read right now than eat.’” To see the effect of literature as a kind of “stomach magic” attests to the visceral nature of how fiction works. In fact, later in the conversation the metaphor shifts a little lower: noting that “aesthetic experience” is ultimately “erotic,” Wallace praises a Barthelme story because it gave him “an erection of the heart” (72).

[55]. “Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions,” The Guardian, September 20, 2008, 2. A version of this has since been published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

[56]. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996; repr., New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 117–18; hereafter cited as IJ. (Note that grammatical idiosyncracies are Wallace’s.) Troeltsch goes on to note what psychologist Timothy Wilson would attribute to “automation”: namely, once tasks are automated, this frees up space within consciousness (i.e., it counters “ego depletion”) for more intentional acts: “Wait until it soaks into the hardware,” he exhorts, “and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in” (ibid., 118).

[57]. The “almost” is important. While monastic formation, contrary to gnosticism, takes embodiment very seriously, it also resists the reductionistic materialism of James Incandenza Sr. (“just meat”). In the next chapter we’ll see that Merleau-Ponty has similar concerns.

[58]. In a conversation about the book with David Lipsky, Wallace is explicit about AA functioning as a stand-in for religion: “A lot of the AA stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have—it’s very hard to talk about people’s relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoyevsky.” But he concedes that Infinite Jest is trying to grapple with a “kind of distorted religious impulse.” Although of Course, 82.

[59]. Ibid.

[60]. In his conversation with Lipsky we get some of Wallace’s own commentary on this point: “So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just—we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow.” (Let’s note that this is a pretty good paraphrase of the opening of Augustine’s Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”) But Wallace continues: “And there’s some kinds of escape—in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way—that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, ‘Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is David Wallace, that you have a pimple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due” (Lipsky, Although of Course, 81). The former sorts of “giveaways” are disciplines; the latter are diversions. And interestingly enough, Wallace goes on to describe the latter as the “Turkish delight” of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (84).

[61]. Cf. one of his later observations during his time in rehab: “That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you” (IJ 205). This can seem scandalous to Christian ears, and it is not unproblematic. However, one could also hear this as a way of saying that we “belong before we believe.” In this respect, it’s not so far from Pascal who, in his famous Wager, suggested that if you couldn’t come to propositional assent about God’s existence, then you could at least attend Mass to “grow” the belief in you. (I’m also reminded of the Peirce Pettis song, “God Believes in You”: “[when] you swear you don’t believe in him / God believes in you.”)

[62]. From an interview Wallace gave Salon, we know that Day is, in fact, a character based on his own experience in a halfway house. And Wallace was particularly perplexed by the effectiveness of this clichéd regimen. See D. T. Max, “The Unfinished,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009, 54.

[63]. One could do a bit of triangulation here to unpack my earlier suggestion that “worship” is akin to “care” in Heidegger’s account. We know from his pre–Being and Time lectures that Heidegger’s analysis of “care” owes much to Augustine’s account of love or caritas. For Augustine, love and worship are intimately connected (see City of God 19.24–26). Thus it’s not too much of a stretch to see a link between care and worship.

Chapter 1  Erotic Comprehension

[64]. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.

[65]. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), addresses those who would be concerned that this sounds like the loss of free will. To those who worry that this claim and all of the evidence that backs it up “seem to deny to consciousness any major role in the conduct of our day-to-day affairs,” his response is blunt but encouraging: “Quite so. But as one of the contributors to this debate points out, this is only a problem if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much ‘me.’ In fact it had better be because so little of life is conscious at all” (186–87). To which I would add one further caution: we ought not to assume that the unconscious is a hardwired, merely biological reality. It is itself formed and acquired, and I can make choices to immerse myself in practices that will re-form my unconscious.

[66]. My proposal will implicitly push back on regnant paradigms in philosophy of action insofar as they uncritically assume an intellectualist account of action (or assume what Hubert Dreyfus calls “mentalism”); that is, most discussions in the field of philosophy of action have accepted something like Donald Davidson’s restriction of what counts as “action” to those acts that are the outcome of conscious, deliberative choice guided by beliefs. All other behaviors or movements are attributed to involuntary instincts or reduced to mere reflexive responses. For a representative survey of this paradigm, see Alfred R. Mele, ed., The Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). In the Mele collection, Jaegwon Kim describes this as “the familiar ‘belief-desire’ pattern of action explanation” (Philosophy of Action, 257): an action is caused by a rational agent who has a belief about some state of affairs and a desire for some goal and thus executes an action on the basis of that belief and in order to achieve that goal. So every action has a “reason for which,” and only movements that can be so explained count as “actions.”

This paradigm, I will suggest, is working with a distinction that is too simple: either conscious, deliberate, chosen action or mere bodily reflex and instinct. As we’ll see below, Merleau-Ponty (and Taylor and Dreyfus following him) identifies a kind of third space: a bodily know-how that guides and drives much that deserves to be called “action.”

[67]. This was forthrightly pictured in an advertisement for a Bible memory verse program in a Christian magazine. Pictured in the ad was a man with a furrowed brow, across which was inscribed: “You are what you think.” The ad went on to suggest that the regular input of Bible verses would transform behavior—that intellectual inputs would yield holiness outputs. Certainly memorization of Scripture is a good, but I will still argue that this assumes a naïve philosophy of action that underestimates—and therefore undervalues—the formative power of practices.

[68]. In this respect, I see this project as parallel to my project in The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), where I outline the creational conditions of interpretation. Both are exercises in Christian philosophy rooted in a confessional understanding of creation and incarnation, attentive to the material conditions of our finitude and embodiment in light of that conviction. For a distinction of such a Christian philosophical project from “theology” proper, see ibid., 7–8. So to allay Barthian worries about any “natural theology” here, I would see my project as more akin to a “theology of nature” than a “natural theology”—per the distinction explored in David Moseley, “‘Parables’ and ‘Polyphony’: The Resonance of Music as Witness in the Theology of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” in Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, ed. Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 240–70, esp. 259–64.

[69]. I adopt this use of the term “intellectualist” following Charles Taylor’s use of the term in “To Follow a Rule . . .” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45–60, esp. 45–49. For a more technical philosophical discussion of the issues broached here, see James K. A. Smith, “Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a ‘Post-Secular’ Sociology of Religion,” in The Post-Secular in Question, ed. Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 159–84.

[70]. Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), 127 (emphasis added).

[71]. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 184.

[72]. Ibid.

[73]. Ibid., 185 (emphasis original).

[74]. That doesn’t mean there are no “givens” or that there’s no “there” there. It just means that our selection of “givens” and data that count as “facts” is itself shaped and determined by this affective priming. As McGilchrist puts it, “disposition towards the world comes first: any cognitions are subsequent to and consequent upon that disposition” (ibid., 184).

[75]. Of course we can articulate rules and principles, but they will be a matter of making explicit what is implicit in the world; and they will not be as operative as we tend to assume when it comes down to generating action. As Hauerwas colorfully puts it, “No ethic, not even the most conservative, should be judged by its ability to influence the behavior of teenagers in the back seat of a car. What happens there will often happen irrespective of what ‘ethic’ has officially been taught.” Stanley Hauerwas, “Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christians Are Doing It,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 490.

[76]. We need to distinguish “feeling” from “emotion”: “Emotional responses can occur long before we become aware that we are feeling an emotion,” Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 59 (emphasis original); hereafter cited as MB. Feeling is conscious; emotion is unconscious; and “awareness” operates along a continuum.

[77]. Johnson helpfully invokes John Dewey’s claim that emotions are not “in” us but rather find their locus in situations, realities that characterize a milieu of organism/environment interaction. So when I say “I am fearful,” this really means “The situation is fearful” (MB 67, emphasis original). Emotions are “both in us and in the world at the same time. They are, in fact, one of the most pervasive ways that we are continually in touch with our environment” (MB 67, emphasis original).

[78]. See, for example, Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[79]. Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories, 242–43. Hogan considers Emma Bovary as a sort of “double-case”: the character of Emma Bovary has her ideals of happiness shaped by romantic novels, while the novel Madame Bovary exercises its own “sentimental education” on the reader (245–46).

[80]. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), ix–x; hereafter cited as PP.

[81]. Merleau-Ponty will describe this in terms that resonate with the young Heidegger, describing his project as a phenomenology of the “natural attitude.” I have discussed this methodological orientation in more detail in Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation, Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2002), 82–112.

[82]. Merleau-Ponty notes Husserl’s distinction between “intentionality of act, which is that of our judgments and of those occasions when we voluntarily take up a position . . . , and operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität), or that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations and in the landscape we see, more clearly than in objective knowledge, and furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language” (PP xx). The Phenomenology of Perception (like this book) is seeking to provide a philosophical account of “operative” intentionality. But precisely for that reason, Merleau-Ponty points out the limits of analysis: “Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly encunciated within us, is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification” (PP xx). Here we hit upon the methodological distinctiveness of phenomenology: its task is nuanced description in the face of “what gives,” and its warrant is the extent to which such descriptions are compelling on the basis of our prephilosophical experience (cf. PP ix).

[83]. Here again Merleau-Ponty criticizes mere analysis for imposing foreign, simplistic categories on the rich complexity of embodied perception: “Analytical reflection becomes a purely regressive doctrine, according to which every perception is a muddled form of intellection” (PP 44). Embodied perception is not just rudimentary knowledge; it is something different altogether: “there is a significance of the percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding” (PP 54). Indeed, “a complete reform of understanding is called for if we are to translate phenomena accurately” (PP 56).

[84]. These are the reductionisms that Tom More, a medical doctor, seeks to evade in Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971). Armed with his Ontological Lapsometer, More can measure the degrees of “angelism” or “animalism” (or “bestialism”). “I have learned,” he says, “that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world” (34). But he also feels that medical science easily falls into animalism, since “there still persists in the medical profession the quaint superstition that only that which is visible is real” (29).

[85]. Merleau-Ponty is a catalyst for Taylor’s critique of intellectualism. The opening chapters of Phenomenology of Perception constitute a deconstruction of both an empiricist reductionism and a rationalist intellectualism. “Intellectualism is unequal to dealing with this perceptual life, either falling short of it [or] overshooting it” (PP 45). In fact, Merleau-Ponty takes intellectualism and empiricism to be sort of mirror images of each other, beset by common “prejudices” and a common failure to honor the hybridity of perception.

[86]. Actually, Merleau-Ponty highlights that not even our reflexive responses are merely passive, “blind” processes: “they adjust themselves to a ‘direction’ of the situation, and express our orientation towards a ‘behavioural setting’ just as much as the action of the ‘geographical setting’ upon us” (PP 91). So even our reflexes are “intentional” in the sense that they are a way we “aim” at the world: “The reflex does not arise from objective stimuli, but moves back towards them, and invests them with a meaning which they do not possess taken singly as psychological agents, but only when taken as a situation” (PP 91–92).

[87]. Iain McGilchrist invokes the same notion: the world generated by “right brain” understanding is characterized by a “betweenness” that is not true of the “left brain” analysis and ratiocination (The Master and His Emissary, 31).

[88]. He clarifies this vis-à-vis the Cartesian philosophical lexicon that has bequeathed us these dichotomies: the human person is neither merely res cogitans nor merely res extensa; “being-in-the-world” is “distinguished from every third person process [and] from every first person form or knowledge” (PP 92).

[89]. Merleau-Ponty actually gets at this with a long consideration of the phenomenon of “phantom limbs,” which testifies to just how significantly we become habituated to a bodily mode of being-in-the-world: “To have a phantom arm is to remain open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable; it is to retain the practical field which one enjoyed before the mutilation” (PP 94, emphasis original).

[90]. See James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 77–80, 123–24. For a relevant discussion of “Romantic” theology, see John Milbank, “The New Divide: Romantic versus Classical Orthodoxy,” Modern Theology 26 (2010): 26–38.

[91]. There are also important differences. Romanticism retains the Enlightenment’s affirmation of the individual and autonomy—it’s just that in Romanticism this manifests itself as an expressivism. A Christian liturgical anthropology, because of its Augustinian debts, will reject both “autonomisms.”

[92]. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” st. 3, in Essential Keats, ed. Philip Levine (New York: Ecco, 1987), 101–2.

[93]. Christopher Ricks, “Undermining Keats,” New York Review of Books 56, no. 20 (December 17, 2009): 46.

[94]. It seems to me a similar aesthetic is at work in the oeuvre of director Wes Anderson.

[95]. Ibid.

[96]. That also means, of course, that the “truth” of Campion’s film is not reducible to my description or summary. My prosaic account can only hope to invite the reader to see the film and thereby experience what Campion has created.

[97]. As Merleau-Ponty continues: “In other words, I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable” (PP 104).

[98]. The role of constitution comes to light if you can recall an experience where you encountered some “givenness” that you could not constitute because you couldn’t make sense of it against the repertoire available in your “background.” Think of the Coke bottle that drops into the experience of the African natives in the opening of the film The Gods Must Be Crazy.

[99]. I should note that, for Merleau-Ponty, motor intentionality is more than just “motor memory” (PP 161–62).

[100]. Even Merleau-Ponty struggles with available terms here. Of course given his argument above, the body can’t be just an “intermediary,” an instrument of something other than the body. As he suggests in the next sentence, the body “understands.” His whole point is that we are our bodies—while also more than our bodies. The use of “intermediary” language here I chalk up to lexical limitations. This also explains the regular use of scare quotes as he tries to talk of the “understanding” of the body, and so forth.

[101]. Husserl’s term, translated as “constitution” above.

[102]. As Merleau-Ponty himself notes, “Before the formula of a new dance can incorporate certain elements of general motility, it must first have had, as it were, the stamp of movement set upon it. As has often been said, it is the body which ‘catches’ and ‘comprehends’ movement. The acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance” (PP 165).

[103]. Merleau-Ponty suggests examples of such habituated “dilation”: “A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is.” Similarly, “if I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can ‘get through’ without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings [PP was published in 1945!], just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body” (PP 165).

[104]. Schneider, in other words, actually processes the world as a “cognitivist” (where “cognitivism” represents a paradigm for “intelligence” that sees all intelligence as the logical manipulation of formal, symbolic representations). On this specific point, Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of cognitivism in “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005), is directly relevant. Dreyfus points out that the cognitivist paradigm that governed research into artificial intelligence exhibits the paucity of this narrow construal of intelligence. Leaders in the field of AI, such as Marvin Minsky at MIT, thought that reproducing human intelligence in computers required the development of machines that could process millions of facts and thus “understand” the world. “In the early seventies, however, Minsky’s AI lab ran into an unexpected problem. Computers couldn’t comprehend the simple stories understood by four-year-olds” (48). Comprehending a story is something more and other than processing facts.

[105]. Compare Nathan D. Mitchell’s discussion of the body as “narrative” in Christian liturgy, in Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 182–83. As Mitchell provocatively suggests, “our bodies make our prayers. . . . After all, the mind will say anything one wants to hear; the body never lies. Liturgy speaks a language whose primary story—whose native narrative or text—is the body itself” (224, emphasis original). My thanks to John Witvliet for pointing me to this rich discussion which, in many ways, is a complement to my project here. Whereas Mitchell is in conversation with Derrida and Marion, I’m engaging Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu (both absent from his work).

[106]. As I noted in Desiring the Kingdom, 52–55, Augustine’s account of agape sees it as rightly ordered eros, so there is no inherent antithesis between agape and eros, though eros is obviously susceptible to all kinds of disordering. Indeed, one could suggest that contemporary culture is dominated by an ethos of disordered eros—which, in a sad, backhanded way, still testifies to our hunger and longing as desiring creatures. Sin does not shut down desire; it misdirects and disorders it.

[107]. Nor is such erotic perception hardwired; while it is “automated,” it has been acquired and is relative to cultural contexts and hence has to be learned.

[108]. Cf. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. Aaron Davenport (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2004).

[109]. “Will presupposes a field of possibilities among which I choose: here is Peter, I can speak to him or not. But if I lose my power of speech, Peter no longer exists for me as an interlocutor, sought after or rejected; what collapses is the whole field of possibilities” (PP 188).

[110]. While I am not able to explore them here, Merleau-Ponty’s account—and a liturgical anthropology—clearly has implications for how we think about counseling and psychology. “Nouthetic” or “biblical” counseling would be a stark example of an intellectualist model of the human person. See Jay E. Adams, Competent to Counsel (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).

[111]. I’m encouraged that even Merleau-Ponty has to resort to the clunky picture of “levels” of consciousness. We are always working with inadequate metaphors here (cf. Kahneman’s admission regarding the inadequacy but heuristic value of “System 1” and “System 2” in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 20–21).

[112]. Since Merleau-Ponty pursues the analogy in more detail later: “Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes, in sensible species, an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to occupy a fragment of space and communicates to those who eat of the consecrated bread, in the same way the sensible not only has a motor and vital significance, but is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so” (PP 246).

[113]. While I have highlighted Merleau-Ponty’s constant critique of intellectualism, he also pushes back on empiricism: “Perception owes nothing to what we know in other ways about the world, about stimuli as physics describes them and about the sense organs as described by biology” (PP 240). In other words, perception is not just impressions that hit bodily receptors. To avoid such reductionism, Merleau-Ponty will even sometimes avail himself of the language of “soul” (PP 99, 102).

[114]. Here Merleau-Ponty falls into that regrettable habit of clumsily distinguishing “we” from “our bodies,” when previously he has clearly emphasized that we don’t have bodies, but we are our bodies (and more).

Chapter 2  The Social Body

[115]. Marshall McLuhan, in a letter to Fr. John W. Mole, OMI, in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), 69. McLuhan puts this quite starkly—more contrastively than I would. But the very contrast is provocative.

[116]. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 11; hereafter cited as LP.

[117]. “Social science must not only, as objectivism would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the ‘objective’ observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object, as is shown for example by the privileged status he gives to communicative and epistemic functions” (LP 27).

[118]. As Bourdieu himself later suggests, we might consider this relationship between theory and practice an analogue to the relation between theology and worship. So what Bourdieu recognizes as the unique challenges of social science and reflection on social practice would be analogous to theological reflection on liturgical practice. It might help some readers to keep this analogy in mind as we work through Bourdieu’s analysis.

[119]. The “pre-logical logic of practice” is to be distinguished from “logical logic,” the logic of objectification. “And this difference, which is inherent in intellectual activity and the intellectual condition, is no doubt what intellectual discourse has least chance of accurately expressing” (LP 19). Welcome to the tensions of the Cultural Liturgies project!

[120]. Bourdieu describes “theoreticist triumphalism” as “the very air breathed by all those who claim the status of an intellectual” (LP 288n6).

[121]. “The ‘thinker’ betrays his secret conviction that action is fully performed only when it is understood, interpreted, expressed, by identifying the implicit with the unthought and by denying the status of authentic thought to the tacit and practical thought that is inherent in all ‘sensible’ action” (LP 36). Thus action becomes “something to be deciphered, when it leads one to say, for example, that a gesture or ritual act expresses something, rather than saying, quite simply, that it is ‘sensible’ (sensé) or, as in English, that it ‘makes sense.’ No doubt because they know and recognize no other thought than the thought of the ‘thinker,’ and cannot grant human dignity without granting what seems to be constitutive of that dignity, anthropologists have never known how to rescue the people they were studying from the barbarism of pre-logic except by identifying them with the most prestigious of their colleagues—logicians or philosophers (I am thinking of the famous title, ‘The primitive as philosopher’)” (LP 37, emphasis original). One could compare the common claim that “every believer is a theologian,” which reflects a similar bias.

[122]. Or as he’ll put this later, “the theoretical error” consists “in presenting the theoretical view of practice as the practical relation to practice” (LP 81). This is one of the errors “that flow from the tendency to confuse the actor’s point of view with the spectator’s point of view, for example looking for answers to a spectator’s questions that practice never asks because it has no need to ask them, instead of wondering if the essence of practice is not precisely that it excludes such questions” (LP 82–83). This reminds me of an offhand remark David Burrell once made in conversation: “Neo-Thomism is that system which answers all of the questions you never thought to ask.”

[123]. Objectivism “proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interactions within it were purely symbolic exchanges” (LP 52).

[124]. How much work in philosophy of religion and theology is the work of (and for) grammarians rather than orators?

[125]. “Like Descartes’ God, whose freedom is limited only by a free decision, such as the one which is the source of the continuity of creation, and in particular of the constancy of truths and values, the Sartrian subject, whether an individual or collective subject, can break out of the absolute discontinuity of choices without past or future only by the free resolution of a pledge and self-loyalty or by the free abdication of bad faith” (LP 43, cf. 45).

[126]. “How can one fail to see that decision, if decision there is, and the ‘system of preferences’ which underlies it, depend not only on all the previous choices of the decider but also on the condition in which his ‘choices’ have been made, which include all the choices of those who have chosen for him, in his place, pre-judging his judgments and so shaping his judgment” (LP 49–50).

[127]. We need to keep in mind that whenever Bourdieu talks about something being “practical,” he means that it is a matter of praxis, of action.

[128]. One could wonder whether Bourdieu, as an anthropologist used to studying largely homogenous societies, is sufficiently attentive to what Charles Taylor calls the “fragilization” and “cross-pressures” of modern societies—our insertion in multiple, competing habitus.

[129]. We must hear corpus, “body,” in this “incorporation”: to be incorporated is to be knit into the social body and to have the community’s habitus inscribed in my body. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that the dynamics being described by Bourdieu are directly relevant to concerns about evangelism, discipleship, and Christian initiation, which are also about incorporation and union with Christ. For relevant discussion, see Tory K. Baucum, Evangelical Hospitality: Catechetical Evangelism in the Early Church and Its Recovery Today (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 2008).

[130]. “The habitus is precisely this immanent law, lex insita, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is the precondition not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for practices of co-ordination” (LP 59).

[131]. In a similar way, Mark Johnson emphasizes that thinking and conceptualization are emergent from our bodily interaction with the world: logic is kind of the “grammar” of our felt orientation. So concepts are not discrete metaphysical entities, and logic is not an inferential system that drops down from heaven or the mind of God: both are emergent from, and dependent upon, our embodied being-in-the-world. “Concepts are not themselves things or quasi-things. They are not mysterious abstract entities with a special ontological significance that sets them over against sensations or percepts. Our language of ‘concepts’ is just our way of saying that we are able to mark various meaningful qualities and patterns within our experience, and we are able to mark these distinctions in a way that permits us to recognize something that is the same over and over across different experiences and thoughts” (MB 88, emphasis original). So instead of speaking of concepts as something we “have” or use, we should speak of conceptualizing as something we (embodied beings) do.

[132]. “Stimuli do not exist for practice in their objective truth, as conditional, conventional triggers, acting only on condition that they encounter agents conditioned to recognize them [which would be an ‘intellectualist’ picture]. The practical world that is constituted in the relationship with the habitus, acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of already realized ends—procedures to follow, paths to take—and of objects endowed with a ‘permanent teleological character,’ in Husserl’s phrase, tools or institutions” (LP 53).

[133]. Mark Johnson also notes this lexical constraint in his discussion of John Dewey who, like Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, was trying to evade the dualism of the Western philosophical tradition. Out to refuse dichotomies of cognition/emotion, thought/feeling, mind/body, Dewey coined the hyphenated phrase “body-mind,” without much improvement (or traction). Johnson rightly comments: “Even our language seems to be against us in our quest for an adequate theory of meaning and the self” (MB 7).

[134]. Indeed, this spectrum is not easily divided. All sorts of seemingly mundane actions are charged with moral significance. Take, for example, the daily habit of putting vegetable scraps in the compost pile: Is that just a mundane action of home management? Or, with a scheme of tending God’s creation and pursuing shalom, could this be a moral matter, a just practice? If all of life is lived coram Deo—before the face of God—it’s hard to sort out what actions don’t have transcendent significance. For a concrete consideration, see Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987).

[135]. In this respect Bourdieu bumps up against our default libertarianism, which thinks an action is only “free” if it is deliberately chosen without any constraint—even the constraint of habit (just the model that Bourdieu finds—and criticizes—in Sartre). In contrast, Bourdieu refuses such libertarian accounts, while also refusing to lapse into a determinism. In this respect, Bourdieu’s account of choice and freedom is more like Augustine’s or Jonathan Edwards’s or—more proximately—Hegel’s, particularly his discussions of freedom in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). As Robert Pippin succinctly summarizes, “For Hegel freedom consists in being in a certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself (which he describes as being able to give my inclinations and incentives a ‘rational form’), which itself is possible . . . only if one is also already in a certain relation (ultimately institutional, norm-governed relations) to others, if one is a participant in certain practices” (in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 2). Pippin goes on to note, in ways resonant with Bourdieu’s claim above, that “my” action is “mine” not if I am the sole, autonomous cause of the action but if I can own the action upon later reflection (and justification) (ibid., 36–37).

[136]. The indefinite article here (“a practical sense”) is important: Bourdieu is not saying that there is one practical sense, “the” practical sense, some universal practical sense. What counts as practical sense is relative to a community of practice and is indexed to a habitus.

[137]. “The body believes in what it plays at. . . . It does not represent what it performs” (LP 73).

[138]. “The logic of practice . . . understands only in order to act” (LP 91).

[139]. This is the error he calls “logicism,” a cousin to the “theoreticism” and “theoretization effect” we noted earlier. Logicism is a kind of logical imperialism that mistakenly thinks that all modes of sense and understanding must ultimately bow to syllogistic standards of what counts as “rational.” “The logicism inherent in the objectivist viewpoint inclines one to ignore the fact that scientific construction cannot grasp the principles of practical logic without forcibly changing their nature” (LP 90).

[140]. This is at the heart of Dreyfus’s critique of McDowell in “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005): 47–65.

[141]. On this point Bourdieu himself takes a shot at “the speculations of the theologians” whom he sees as particularly guilty of theoretical replications, imposing their own prejudices onto the integrity of religious practice as practice: “Always tending to project their own states of mind into the analysis of the religious, they have moved on without difficulty, through a reconversion homologous with that of the analysts of literature, to a spiritualized form of semiology in which Heidegger or Congar rub shoulders with Lévi-Strauss or Lacan or even Baudrillard” (LP 295n9)—perhaps even Bourdieu! Herein lie my concerns about the rising influence of “analytic theology”: while there might be appropriate parameters for such analytic clarification, analytic theology will always run the risk of “the heresy of paraphrase” (and I’m not convinced that Eleonore Stump’s corrective in “The Problem of Evil: Analytic Philosophy and Narrative,” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 251–64, is sufficient to curtail this).

[142]. It’s hard not to recall here that moving scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (New York: Vintage, 2006), in which the father, teetering on the brink of survival with his son, responds ritually: “The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74).

[143]. In a way very similar to Dreyfus’s critique of mentalism in “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental.”

[144]. Bourdieu is drawing on Georges Duby’s study, Le temps des cathedrals: l’art et le société de 980 à 1420 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 18.

[145]. Again, there are direct implications here for thinking about Christian initiation and sanctification. That’s why part 2 below is concerned with “sanctified perception.”

[146]. Recall Bourdieu’s specific target: methodological issues in the social sciences. If the goal of anthropology, for instance, is to work with a theory of what it is to be “native,” and if becoming a native is a “slow process of co-option,” then there are going to be inherent challenges for any participant observer who is not a “native” of the community being studied. On the other hand, if the anthropologist is a native, then she faces a different challenge: breaking out of the accomplished naïveté of native membership (LP 67) in order to achieve objectivity (which Bourdieu is not willing to give up on).

[147]. “Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself.” Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Vintage, 1970), 34.

[148]. Drawing on the work of Carl Plantinga, I have elsewhere discussed how film viewing trains our emotions to construe the world in extra-cinematic contexts. See James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 73–80.

[149]. One might worry that this undercuts the liturgical ideal of “full, conscious, active participation”; but I don’t think that’s true. Let’s remember: I’m trying to get an account of how liturgies work, including secular liturgies. While Christian worship practice invites us to full, conscious, active participation, there is always more formation going on than what we’re “conscious” of. Similarly—and perhaps even more significantly—the formative power of secular liturgies does not seem to require “full, conscious, active participation” to be quite powerfully effective.

[150]. Carson McCullers, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” in The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 143–52.

Chapter 3  “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live”: How Worship Works

[151]. Baudelaire, “The Artist’s Confiteor,” in Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 7.

[152]. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996; repr., New York: Back Bay Books, 2006); and Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (New York: Vintage, 1988); hereafter cited as Mezz.

[153]. On the fascination with developments in drinking straw technology, see Mezz 4n1; on perforation, see Mezz 74n1. (Footnotes in a novel are another point of contact between Wallace and Baker.)

[154]. This can be attributed to what the narrator himself describes as the “background” effect discovered in childhood: the fact that “anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background.” In short, “anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention” (Mezz 38). Heidegger, of course, would disagree about whether this is the “true stature” of the object; for him, when the object is de-sedimented from its concernful use within an “understood” environment and made to be something “present-at-hand,” there’s a certain forgetting of what the “thing” is (pragmata). See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 95–104.

[155]. “Nature” barely makes a showing, and when it does, it is squelched and squeezed by the concrete of culture. Consider the contrasts in this passage:

Under the impetus of a big-necked man and a rushed woman behind him, the revolving door from the lobby had been circulating a little too fast; when my turn came, I took advantage of the existing momentum by milling through my slice of its pie chart without contributing any additional force, rolling up a sleeve. Outside, it was noontime, noontime! Fifteen healthy, coltish slender trees grew out of the brick plaza a short way into the blue sky in front of my building, each casting an arrangement of potato chip–shaped shadows over its circular cast-iron trunk collar. (“Neenah Foundry Co. Neenah, Wis.”) Men and women, seated on benches in the sun near raised beds of familiar corporate evergreens (cotoneaster, I think) were withdrawing wrapped delicacies from dazzling white bags. (Mezz 105)

Nature is ringed and framed by cast-iron artifice; the metaphors for trees derive from consumer culture; and even the basic “natural” act of eating is wrapped in plastic.

[156]. There are exceptions to this: he carries “a black Penguin paperback” (an edition of Aurelius’s Meditations), makes reference to the Rubáiyát (as we noted above), refers to a biography of Wittgenstein he read (Mezz 121n1), and notes someone else reading Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Mezz 120n1). But he notes that he had “come to history first through the backs of record albums” (Mezz 123) and that he had “read no more than twenty pages of” any of the other Penguin classics he had purchased. Is it very far from here to the world of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, where no one reads books but only “scans texts”?

[157]. For more on this notion, see James K. A. Smith, The Devil Reads Derrida: And Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), chap. 23.

[158]. David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 8.3 (1988): 8.

[159]. So Brooks, following the psychologist Jerome Bruner, distinguishes “paradigmatic thinking” that traffics in logic and analysis from the “narrative mode” that weaves together our world on the level of the imagination (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement [New York: Random House, 2011], 54–55).

[160]. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 216.

[161]. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 11.

[162]. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 52–54. In this respect, my project resonates with others working in the philosophy of social sciences, particular Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Christian Smith, all of whom emphasize the centrality of narrative or story in the formation of both individual and communal identity—and in shaping our action and ethical behavior. If our actions and behavior are driven by an affective, preconscious, imaginative construal of our world, then the aesthetic register of stories has a better “fit” with our adaptive unconscious. In short, stories shape and influence our action. Hence, MacIntyre, Taylor, and Christian Smith also emphasize the need for social-scientific research of human action to recognize that humans are “narrative animals.” As Christian Smith comments, “For all our science, rationality, and technology, we moderns are no less the makers, tellers, and believers of narrative construals of existence, history, and purpose than were our forebears at any other time in human history.” Even more than that, he adds, “We not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories.” Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 64.

[163]. As defined in Desiring the Kingdom, 86.

[164]. Johnson emphasizes that this entails a “generalization” of aesthetics beyond art or “the beautiful”: “Instead, aesthetics becomes the study of everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience meaning.” In this sense, “an aesthetics of human understanding should become the basis for all philosophy.” The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), x; hereafter cited as MB.

[165]. The capitalization of certain words and phrases in this chapter reflects Johnson’s usage in Meaning and the Body.

[166]. Theologically, we should note that if this is an accurate account of our embodiment, and hence the conditions of our experience, then these would also be the conditions under which God’s revelation would have to be manifest. For further discussion of this incarnational dynamic, see James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation, Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2002), 153–79.

[167]. Johnson later connects this threefold axiom to our specific concern with ritual formation:

Meaning requires a functioning brain, in a living body that engages its environments—environments that are social and cultural, as well as physical and biological. Cultural artifacts and practices—for example, language, architecture, music, art, ritual acts, and public institutions—preserve aspects of meaning as objective features of the world. Without these cultural artifacts, our accumulated meaning, understanding, and knowledge would not be preserved over time, and each new generation would have to literally start over from scratch. Fortunately, because of social and cultural cognition, we do not have to relearn the meaning of our world. Each child, and each social group, can appropriate those objects and activities in which a culture’s meanings and values are sedimented. However, we must keep in mind that those sociocultural objects, practices, and events are not meaningful in themselves. Rather, they become meaningful only insofar as they are enacted in the lives of human beings who use the language, live by the symbols, sing and appreciate the music, participate in the rituals, and reenact the practices and values of institutions. (MB 152, emphasis original)

Anyone who’s worried that there’s no room for God to show up here should consider more carefully: God’s revelation and presence can constitute part of the environment of our experience, and our intersubjective relationship to God is the most fundamental aspect of “social” cognition. So to accept Johnson’s threefold conditions of experience is far from accepting a naturalism: it can be a way of recognizing the conditions of the goodness of creation—conditions God deigns to inhabit in an “incarnational” move, both in the Incarnation and in his self-revelation.

[168]. Johnson also emphasizes that this is always already a “body-based intersubjectivity—our being with others via bodily expression, gesture, imitation, and interaction” that is “constitutive of our identity from our earliest days, and it is the birthplace of meaning” (MB 51).

[169]. Or, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, even philosophers are still animals. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 36.

[170]. See Suzanne Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). Johnson comments: “Because Langer was writing at a time when logical empiricism permitted only conceptual and propositional structures to be part of cognitive meaning, she had to coin a new term, ‘vital import,’ to identify the kind of significance she was pointing to. She knew, but wasn’t then permitted to say, that vital import was just as much a part of human meaning as an abstract ‘cognitive content’ of propositions or sentences” (MB 44).

[171]. What constitutes “normal” conditions, of course, will not be universal.

[172]. And given the recognition of pliability of juvenile neural maps, we have a bodily basis for appreciating the importance of early childhood faith formation.

[173]. We should remember that our term aesthetic owes its origin to the Greek αἰσθάνεσθαι, which simply referred to perception by the senses. The narrowing of the term to the realms of art and beauty is a modern phenomenon.

[174]. One can see Johnson’s Meaning of the Body as an advance from his earlier work, with George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), which begins with the claim that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action” (3). (The aesthetic trajectory of his later work is hinted at on pp. 235–36. It seems to me that in Metaphors We Live By, Johnson had not yet made the “pragmatist” turn that would release him sufficiently from “representationalist” paradigms.) The earlier work argued for the centrality, even primacy, of metaphor but didn’t yet tease out the implication of this: that if this is true, then our account of human understanding and experience must be fundamentally an aesthetics—more of a “poetics” than an epistemology.

[175]. Or as Paul Ricoeur puts it, “The metaphorical meaning of a word is nothing which can be found in the dictionary.” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 169. Ricoeur also delineates the reasons for this. First, metaphor is contextual: “metaphorical use must be solely contextual, that is, a meaning which emerges as the unique and fleeting result of a certain contextual action” (169). Second, and because of this, metaphorical meaning is interactive: it is produced “between” different senses, and between the author and reader (170). Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphor is nicely summarized by Henry Venema: “Metaphorical statements are not decorative devices in which one simply substitutes one lexical meaning for another; they are genuine creations of meaning that have not yet been added to the virtual system of semiotic signifiers. The production of metaphorical meaning through semantic interaction is irreducible to the dictionary meaning of its semiotic elements.” Venema, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 81.

[176]. Though I don’t think novelty is an essential aspect of metaphoricity. Granted, some metaphors will be powerful precisely because they are innovative, but other metaphors do not seem to lose their meaning or force just because of repetition. Indeed, metaphors can have an enduring meaning that can take you by surprise, even after much repetition. It is precisely the play and range and allusivity of metaphor that enables a metaphor to keep generating meaning. Or, similarly, a metaphor can be a powerful force of memory—it can bring back worlds to us. I was happy to discover that Iain McGilchrist makes the same point. “Metaphor does not have to be new: in fact the best ones never can be. They are like the language of love, as old as the hills yet fresh with every new lover. The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life. True metaphor is a union like love.” Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist, “This Is Your Brain on Poetry,” Poetry 197 (October 2010): 44.

[177]. Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 50. Begbie goes on to note that music’s meaning is just this sort of irreducible metaphoricity (52).

[178]. Calvin Seerveld, Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task (Toronto: Tuppence, 1980), 27.

[179]. Ibid., 125–35.

[180]. McGilchrist makes the same point: “the importance of metaphor is that it underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art” (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010], 71, emphasis original). What I, following Johnson, am describing as “aesthetic,” McGilchrist would call “right-brained.”

[181]. In suggesting this, I think that Johnson’s account of primary metaphors—as I’m extending it here—could supplement Nathan Mitchell’s important discussion of the “logic of metaphor” in Christian worship in Meeting Mystery, 189–227.

[182]. Other examples he discusses include AFFECTION IS WARMTH, IMPORTANT IS BIG, PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, TIME IS MOTION, and many others (MB 179).

[183]. This is not to say that all people acquire the same primary metaphors: again, we would have to recognize the differences in environmental contexts. One can easily appreciate how different environments would yield different primary metaphors. What Johnson doesn’t entertain is the possibility that one could simultaneously acquire “competing” primary metaphors.

[184]. This is akin to Bourdieu’s claim regarding “logical logic” versus the “logic of practice.” To translate Johnson’s argument into Bourdieu’s language: logical logic is a derivation from the logic of practice.

[185]. This will have implications for how we think about dogmas and doctrines. If doctrines are on the order of complex metaphors and concepts, then in some sense they bubble up from primary metaphors forged in practice. I hope to explore this dynamic in more detail in James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Relativism? Taking Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Brandom to Church, Church and Postmodern Culture Series (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, forthcoming).

[186]. See, for example, George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

[187]. See Desiring the Kingdom, chaps. 3 and 5, respectively.

[188]. I think this is exactly what Emmanuel Levinas accounts for in his phenomenology of “living from . . .” in Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 110–21, 147–51. For relevant discussion, see Jeffrey Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000). Consider also Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh’s analysis of the significance of construing creation as “home” in Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

[189]. McGilchrist helps us appreciate the “mechanics” of this, as it were, by a kind of triangulation. As he suggests, the right hemisphere of the brain is the “between” of body and (left-brained, analytic) mind: “The right hemisphere is in general more intimately connected with the limbic system, an ancient subcortical system that is involved in the experience of emotions of all kinds, and with other subcortical structures, than is the left hemisphere” (The Master and His Emissary, 58). The right hemisphere is that part of the brain that negotiates metaphorical inference (71) as well as the understanding of narrative (76).

[190]. There is a basically Aristotelian intuition here: an agent always acts for his own good. But now there’s a kind of aesthetic qualifier: it’s not primarily that we know this good but that we imagine the good.

[191]. Thus Charles Taylor emphasizes that a “social imaginary” is “carried in images, stories, and legends.” Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.

[192]. I’m playing here on the notion of a “general hermeneutics” (following Hans-Georg Gadamer) that expands the scope of interpretation to experience “in general.” For discussion, see James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 159–63.

[193]. While I cannot do justice to it here, in the ballpark are conversations internal to the Reformational tradition of aesthetics in the philosophical heritage stemming from Herman Dooyeweerd. With Dooyeweerd, I’m emphasizing that there is an aesthetic “aspect” of all human existence; but I agree with Calvin Seerveld’s suggestion that “Dooyeweerd’s placement of aesthetic structure in the order of modal complexity needs reworking since aesthetic affairs are much more fundamental an underground in human experience than Dooyeweerd seems to admit.” Seerveld, “Dooyeweerd’s Legacy for Aesthetics: Modal Law Theory,” in The Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd: Reflections on Critical Philosophy in the Christian Tradition, ed. C. T. McIntire (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 41–79 (quote at 68).

[194]. This resonates with, but also differs from, William Dyrness’s project in Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). It seems to me that Dyrness’s project is fundamentally an apologetic—a cultural theology that takes the arts (“the poetic”) seriously in order to discern in our artistic endeavors what is really a longing for God (see esp. 201, 246). Dyrness also expands the “poetic” to include “everyday” endeavors, but then does so by linking such cultural projects to beauty. In sum, I find the meaning of “poetic” in his project to be equivocal. For my critique of Dyrness, see James K. A. Smith, “Erotic Theology,” Image 69 (2011): 118–20. My “general poetics” is focused on the fundamentally aesthetic mode in which we constitute our worlds. Dyrness is also more focused on affirming what’s good in “secular liturgies” (emphasizing “common grace”), whereas I have tended to emphasize the antithesis between the vision of the good life carried in secular liturgies and the vision of shalom that is performed in Christian worship. However, my antithetical account is not a “total” critique. Following Augustine, I would advocate nuanced, ad hoc evaluation of particular cultural practices. For a relevant discussion, see James K. A. Smith, “Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms, or Two Cities?,” Calvin Theological Journal 47 (2012): 122–37. These themes will be addressed in much more detail in volume 3 of Cultural Liturgies.

[195]. For a discussion of how stories can be normative, see N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011), 24–25.

[196]. Johnson notes the ambiguity of Kant’s legacy in this regard. On the one hand, “nowhere is the derogation of the aesthetic more pronounced than in the impressive aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant. . . . His adherence to a faculty psychology that rigidly demarcates cognitive from noncognitive mental acts made it impossible for him to ever fully embrace imagination (and feeling) as the key to meaning and understanding.” In fact, “his reduction of the aesthetic to feeling alone and his exclusion of feeling from cognition and knowledge were carried forward most fatefully into twentieth-century aesthetic theory” (MB 211). On the other hand, “In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant toyed with the pervasiveness of blended imaginative-feeling-thinking processes in how we experience meaning, but he was never able to give up his architectonic of cognitive functions, and so he always pulls back from acknowledging the embodiment of mind, thought, and language.” And so we have a missed opportunity. But “Kant’s profound treatment of imagination” could be “substantially revised to place imagination at the core of all experience, understanding, and reasoning” (MB 211). Gilles Deleuze seems to suggest something similar in his meta-reading of Kant’s project, suggesting that the insights of the Critique of Judgment, which makes the imagination central, should have a kind of retroactive impact on the earlier Critiques. See Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964).

[197]. McGilchrist, “Four Walls,” in Poetry, vol. 196, no. 4 (July/August 2010), 335.

[198]. Recall that Schneider was unable to understand a story because he lacked this “between,” this “antepredicative” knowledge. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 153.

[199]. For discussion, see Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 39–40.

[200]. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 24.

[201]. Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 41.

[202]. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 17, quoted in Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 46.

[203]. Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 82.

[204]. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 94 (emphasis original).

[205]. Elsewhere Ricoeur describes this as the “configurational” operation of narrative. While sequence or chronology is part of narrative, it is not the sole defining feature—which is why nonlinear narrative is still narrative. The “configurational dimension, present both in the art of narrating and the art of following a story,” is a kind of aesthetic mode of constitution bound up with narrative. “This complex structure implies that the most humble narrative is always more than a chronological series of events and, in turn, that the configurational dimension cannot eclipse the episodic dimension without abolishing the narrative structure itself.” Ricoeur, “The Narrative Function,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 278–79.

[206]. “[T]he narrative function repeats the conceptual pattern Ricoeur developed in The Rule of Metaphor: the production of linguistic innovation that unifies identity and difference.” Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 92. Thus Venema sees Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative as “forming a pair with The Rule of Metaphor” (91).

[207]. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xi, quoted in Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 92.

[208]. Though we need to keep in mind that the sort of “belief” we’re talking about here is what Bourdieu described as “practical belief”—the sort of belief that is “a state of the body” (LP 68).

[209]. See, for example, Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005); and Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004).

[210]. Brian Boyd also calls this “evocriticism” in “For Evocriticism: Minds Shaped to Be Reshaped,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 394–404.

[211]. See James Phelan, “Narrative Theory, 1966–2006: A Narrative,” a new chapter in the fortieth anniversary edition of Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 283–336.

[212]. As famously phrased by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer,” University of California Santa Barbara, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html, principle 5.

[213]. In an incisive critique, Jonathan Kramnick argues that literary Darwinism appropriates a problematic model of “adaptation,” which creates problems at the ground floor of this school of thought. See Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 315–47, esp. 324–33.

[214]. Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” 344.

[215]. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 129.

[216]. Ibid., 130.

[217]. Overlooked in recent conversations are Simon Lesser’s prescient insights about the intersection of science and literature in “A Note on the Use of Scientific Psychological Knowledge in Literary Study,” an appendix to Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1957), 294–308.

[218]. Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” 346–47.

[219]. Phelan, “Narrative Theory, 1966–2006,” 290.

[220]. See, for example, Alan Richardson, “Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion,” Poetics Today 23 (2002): 141–60; and Mark J. Bruhn, “Shelley’s Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism,” Poetics Today 30 (2009): 373–422.

[221]. I am obviously only hinting at what could be a lifelong research agenda. Consider just two concrete examples. Lisa Zunshine explores the “cognitive underpinnings” of A. L. Barbauld’s eighteenth-century Hymns in Prose for Children to discern the way Barbauld’s “catechist” approach “mobilizes the contingencies of our evolved cognitive architecture.” Understanding how a “catechist” approach marshals cognitive underpinnings could give us insight into how Christian catechetical instruction might do the same. See Zunshine, “Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in A. L. Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781),” Poetics Today 23 (2002): 123–39. More recently, Marco Caracciolo has suggested that the phenomenological model of “enacted” cognition can help us appreciate “how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them.” This seems an obvious avenue to consider how stories help Christians “imagine” their world as one laden with God’s presence and call. See Caracciolo, “Narrative, Meaning, Interpretation: An Enactivist Approach,” Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, August 4, 2011, http://www.springerlink.com/content/764065387174464v/fulltext.html.

[222]. Though Didion perhaps means to suggest this in her famous opening phrase from The White Album, which I’ve recontextualized as the title for this chapter!

[223]. This is an important point to keep in mind: what we refer to as “art” is an intensification of the aesthetic aspect that characterizes being-in-the-world more broadly, and more fundamentally. Again, see Seerveld, “Dooyeweerd’s Legacy for Aesthetics.”

[224]. McGilchrist’s critique of modernism in art is that it requires too much disengagement from our immersion in experience: it is art that is too self-conscious, thus resonating with (and requiring) intellectual reflection that shunts aside our aesthetic sense. For example, in a modernist poem by John Ashberry, “There is a tension between what has to engage our conscious debating minds and what must carry us into a realm beyond any ratiocination. An excessive fear of being direct, and the worship of the difficult, endemic in Modernism, threaten at times to undermine the direction that poetry inevitably takes, away from what we have to ‘work out’ for ourselves toward what we thought we knew already, but in fact never understood” (“This Is Your Brain on Poetry,” 45).

[225]. Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 203. Zuidervaart very helpfully distinguishes theories of truth that are “nonpropositionalist” (which do not see propositions as the only or primary bearers of truth) and “antipropositionalist” theories, which seem to leave no room to affirm that propositions can be true. With Zuidervaart, I am a nonpropositionalist. We relativize propositional truth without rejecting it.

[226]. See David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and Catherine Brady, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

[227]. Ricoeur, “The Narrative Function,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 277 (emphasis original).

[228]. Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 217–18. A photograph of a similar work by Recker appears on the cover of Zuidervaart’s book.

[229]. Ibid., 218.

[230]. I further develop this theme of “attunement,” in dialogue with Heidegger, in James K. A. Smith, “Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a ‘Post-Secular’ Sociology of Religion,” in The Post-Secular in Question, ed. Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 159–84.

[231]. It’s the “all” that’s the problem here. Of course we do sometimes explicitly and even deliberately choose to sin. But intellectualist accounts think all sinful action can be accounted for in this way.

[232]. Thus it’s no accident that John Piper, the author of Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), sees racism as a problem of individual responsibility rather than systemic injustice (in Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian [Wheaton: Crossway, 2011])—and thus advocates different choices and the (individualist) “miracle” of grace as the solution. For a helpful discussion of the problems with Piper’s approach, see Mark Mulder, “Right Diagnosis—Wrong Cure,” Comment, January 18, 2012, http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/3038/right-diagnosis-wrong-cure.

[233]. It’s important to remember that for Augustine, the “earthly city” is not merely “temporal” life or “creation.” The origin of the “earthly city” is the Fall, which is why the earthly city is antithetical to the city of God. For further discussion of this point, see Smith, “Reforming Public Theology.”

[234]. Walter Isaacson recounts the emergence of Apple’s touchscreen technology for the iPhone in Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 465–75. The final description is telling: “The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could fondle it” (473). Not surprisingly, it’s in this same chapter that Alan Keyes is quoted as saying, “Steve understands desire” (474). Indeed, has any company better understood the erotics of design?

[235]. We might also recall Bertie being forced to write with his right hand in The King’s Speech (see chap. 1).

[236]. In fact, one might wonder whether the basic orientation to the world that is “carried” and learned in this micropractice isn’t analogous to the “training” one would receive from viewing pornography, whereby (predominantly) men unconsciously learn to construe women as objects available to be selected, viewed, touched, and enjoyed at the whim of the user.

[237]. I recently encountered a probing evaluation of our relationship to technology from the playwright Tony Kushner that is directly relevant here: “Capitalism has done exactly what Marx said it does—it gives the inorganic machine the qualities of the living beings who created it and makes it seem like a living thing itself, not a dead thing created by human labor. We’re trained through market research and the dark genius of advertising to develop increasingly erotically charged relationships with the inorganic. You develop the feeling that you can’t live without your iPhone or your iPad because they’re sold to you as having souls, as magical manna from heaven, instead of what they actually are, which is just stuff that people put together.” “The Art of Theater No. 16: Tony Kushner,” The Paris Review 201 (Summer 2012): 118.

[238]. Desiring the Kingdom, 84.

[239]. For illuminating analysis and wisdom, see Brad J. Kallenberg, God and Gadgets: Following Jesus in a Technological World (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), esp. 82–105.

[240]. For a helpful discussion of vainglory in the context of pedagogy and formation, see Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, “Pedagogical Rhythms: Practices and Reflections on Practice,” in Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, ed. David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 24–42.

[241]. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 481.

[242]. Ibid., 482.

[243]. Wallace, “Fictional Futures,” 3.

[244]. Ibid., 6.

[245]. Ibid., 7.

[246]. Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?,” New York Review of Books 57, no. 18 (November 25, 2010): 57–60 (emphasis added). See also Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010).

[247]. As J. Todd Billings notes, “The Lord’s Supper, as an icon of the gospel, not only offers communion with Christ and with Christ’s body but also directs the lives of the communicants to the ‘in God’ dimension of the neighbor” (Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011], 113–14).

Chapter 4  Restor(y)ing the World: Christian Formation for Mission

[248]. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “The Gift of the Church and the Gifts God Gives It,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 25.

[249]. On the continuity between the “cultural mandate” (Gen. 1:26–31) and the “Great Commission” (Matt. 28:18–20), see James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 205–7.

[250]. For clear articulation of the expansive scope of the mission of God, and hence the mission of God’s people, see Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006); and Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010).

[251]. Consider Graham Ward’s careful parsing of just what counts as “Christian action,” analyzed in terms of six key elements: the agent who acts, the nature of the action, evaluation of the action, the object of the action, the effect of the action, and the intentions and affections (“pro-attitudes,” after Donald Davidson) that lead to action. See Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens, The Church and Postmodern Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 181–201. In many ways, I see the present book as expanding and deepening our analysis of the sixth aspect.

[252]. Matthew Myer Boulton, Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 24.

[253]. Ibid., 223.

[254]. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

[255]. J. Todd Billings, Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 110.

[256]. Ward, Politics of Discipleship, 184.

[257]. Ibid., 187.

[258]. Ibid., 184. As he puts it a little later, “We might characterize Christian acting as a praxis that participates in a divine poiesis that has soteriological and eschatological import” (201).

[259]. See Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, The True Story of the Whole World: Finding Your Place in the Biblical Drama (Grand Rapids: Faith Alive, 2009), echoing N. T. Wright: “the whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world” (The New Testament and the People of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992], 41–42).

[260]. In a rich footnote, Boulton suggests that proposals by Willimon and Hauerwas differ from Calvin insofar as their “Anabaptist” conception of the church is more centripetal than centrifugal (Life in God, 219n8). I think he’s right to feel a difference here; I would only caution that even the centrifugal telos requires persistent centripetal gathering for formation. In other words, centrifugal mission is only possible to the extent that we are centripetally recentered in Christ through Word, sacrament, and that repertoire of formative Christian practices. For the sake of Geneva, one might say, the saints needed to regularly gather in St. Pierre Cathedral.

[261]. There are a host of knotty questions and issues here regarding Christian engagement with the “politics” of the earthly city that I will address in detail in volume 3, Embodying the Kingdom.

[262]. For a discussion of the social implications of this, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 211–33, with further consideration in Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 77–84. I will discuss this in more detail in Haunting Immanence: Reading Charles Taylor in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming).

[263]. For a classic summary of this vision of the Reformation as unleashing “world-formative” Christianity, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983).

[264]. I already noted Calvin’s affirmation of a “holy and lawful monasticism” in Desiring the Kingdom, 209n118.

[265]. Boulton, Life in God, 13.

[266]. Ibid., 22.

[267]. Ibid., 23–24.

[268]. Ibid., 27.

[269]. Ibid., 43. The latter qualification is important if we are to avoid concerns about a “theonomist” project. Again, I will take up these questions in volume 3.

[270]. For example, Calvin proposed a daily prayer cycle, “in effect a version of the divine office designed to be practicable to all Christians” (ibid., 39); he also advocated more frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper for the sake of Christian formation (40–42).

[271]. Ibid., 25.

[272]. Ibid., 26 (emphasis added).

[273]. Everything I’ll say here also applies to Christian schools at lower levels, and could also apply to other missional institutions of the church such as campus ministries, mental health facilities, summer camps, and more.

[274]. While I hope I have provided new warrant and impetus for the importance of the aesthetic in Christian formation, the proposal itself is not new. Indeed, I commend Calvin Seerveld’s manifesto from a generation ago: “The Fundamental Importance of Imaginativity within Schooling,” in Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task (Toronto: Tuppence, 1980), 138–55. Seerveld frames the importance of imaginativity in Christian education in terms of “the sanctification of a person’s functional complexity” (141). His “working hypothesis” is that “aesthetic life is integral to sound Christian pedagogy, deserves a curricular attention, and is the philosophical place to order the so many ‘intangibles’ that make a school’s life thrive or flag” (152). And in a wonderful admission that resonates with my own sense of lack, Seerveld confesses: “I have no master plan for consolidating functional features of imaginativity at this point, but I know it is important” (152).

[275]. Daniel Kahneman notes in Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) that story is understood by “System 1” of our consciousness—the automated, “intuitive” register that governs so much of our action in the world (75).

[276]. Walter Brueggemann, The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 22–23.

[277]. This narrative intuition is what informs Sally Lloyd-Jones’s evocative exercise in The Jesus Storybook Bible, illustrated by Jago (Grand Rapids: Zonderkidz, 2007). While one might have some reservations about this kind of improvisation on the Scriptures, those need not detain us from recognizing and affirming Lloyd-Jones’s intuition: “The Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne—everything—to rescue the one he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life!” (17).

[278]. Seerveld, Rainbows, 151.

[279]. Ibid.

[280]. Michael L. Budde, “Collecting Praise: Global Culture Industries,” in Hauerwas and Wells, Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 124. For a trenchant analysis of the “practical aesthetic imagination” that explains “contemporary capitalism’s magical powers,” see Nigel Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 289–308.

[281]. Budde, “Collecting Praise,” 125.

[282]. Ibid., 124.

[283]. And by this, I don’t mean art that is reduced to propaganda. For a relevant critique, see Calvin Seerveld, Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves (Toronto: Tuppence, 2000), 126–28.

[284]. For a relevant discussion of the relationship between Scripture, story, and authority, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 139–43.

[285]. In other words, what distinguishes different rituals of ultimacy is the specific vision of the good life that is “carried” in them—the telos to which they are aimed.

[286]. I suspect this is a post-Enlightenment distinction, after the “intellectualization” of Christianity in the German Enlightenment and its heirs.

[287]. Scott-Martin Kosofsky, The Book of Customs: A Complete Handbook for the Jewish Year (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2004), 1. My thanks to Lee Hardy for pointing me to this resource.

[288]. See Peter Ochs, “Philosophic Warrants for Scriptural Reasoning,” Modern Theology 22 (2006): 465–82.

[289]. Peter Ochs, “Morning Prayers as Redemptive Thinking,” in Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption, ed. Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold, Radical Traditions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 50–87.

[290]. Randi Rashkover, “The Future of the Word and the Liturgical Turn,” in Rashkover and Pecknold, Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption, 1.

[291]. Ochs, “Morning Prayers,” 50. The only reservation I have with Ochs’s otherwise remarkable exposition of the “nurturing” effect of the practice of Morning Prayer is a lingering anthropology or model of the human person that still tends to privilege “judging” as our everyday mode of being-in-the-world. That is, my concern is that it still envisions the primary or crucial telos of such “alternative nurturance” to be a matter of (albeit redemptive) thinking, or (albeit scriptural) reasoning. To retain this emphasis on judgment, thinking, and cognition suggests that, even though the entire project is contesting the logical habits of “the modern West” (86), the project remains haunted by the ghosts of Descartes and Kant. In a similar way, I find the pray-er in Ochs’s account is still a primarily perceiving animal in a narrow sense. We awake each day in order to perceive the world: “Daylight means a realm of experience in which creatures are perceivable. Losing the safety of their nighttime vagueness, they become what can be seen and what can, therefore, be received in some particular way as opposed to another way. . . . To be awake is to judge” (54). As soon as we wake up, even before we roll out of bed, Ochs pictures us as perceiving animals making judgments: “Oh, that is my breath! I am alive. Oh, that is my sock—it is on the floor.” And we venture into our day to go about “perceiving, conceiving, and interpreting” (55). But is that really how we start our day? Do I immediately wake up perceiving, judging? In fact, do I even spend most of the day in such a spectator-like relationship to the world? Or am I rather absorbed in the world, involved with the world, making my way in the world without thinking about it? Before we perceive, don’t we care? For further discussion, see James K. A. Smith, “How Religious Practices Matter: Peter Ochs’ ‘Alternative Nurturance’ of Philosophy of Religion,” Modern Theology 24 (2008): 469–78.

[292]. Ochs, “Morning Prayers,” 86.

[293]. Ibid.

[294]. For an important account of these historic Christian intuitions—and the necessity for recovering them today—see Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).

[295]. Boulton, Life in God, 24.

[296]. Here I’m expanding on some cautions initially articulated in Desiring the Kingdom, 151–54.

[297]. Billings offers a cautionary tale in this regard when he notes that apartheid in the South African Reformed church was initially entertained as a “missional” strategy to expand outreach opportunities to whites who might not be “comfortable” worshiping with blacks. “Lest we think that the movement [for segregated communion] emerging from 1857 is utterly foreign to contemporary concerns, in many ways it can be understood as an instance where the church was being flexible, evangelical, and ‘missional’ rather than being rigidly Reformational” (Union with Christ, 101).

[298]. This is the case even if the “worship” (i.e., song service) in such congregations is overwhelmingly emotivist. There is an interesting irony in the ballpark here. Throughout the Cultural Liturgies project, I emphasize the importance of affect and emotion, and yet I’m critical of emotivism as merely expressionist and lacking any strong sense of the formative aspects of worship. The flipside is the irony: it is precisely those forms of worship that are so thoroughly emotivist that are often wed to “intellectualist” construals of Christian faith.

[299]. One could say something similar by invoking Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message.” As it turns out, this is not just a felicitous overlap. In fact, McLuhan’s own conversion to Catholicism and immersion in the liturgy was a significant part of the “background” that informed his theorizing. For some of his reflections on liturgy, and on religion more generally, see Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999).

[300]. I should note that by “form” I do not mean “style.” The form of worship is the logic of the practice—the coherence of the story that is rehearsed and enacted by the practice. So the “form” of worship is more about the shape of worship—the elements that constitute the narrative arc of a worship service. Such a form can be instantiated in a number of different styles. So to emphasize a historic “form” of worship is not an apologetic for pipe organs over banjos and mandolins.

[301]. I will not rehearse the specifics of this received shape of Christian worship. For a sketch, see Desiring the Kingdom, chap. 5. See also the chart “The Common Shape of Liturgy” in this section, which utilizes Frank Senn’s masterful overview of the common shape of Christian worship from pp. 646–47 of Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). Senn’s parallel overview of the Roman Missal (1969), Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1977), The Methodist Hymnal (1989), and Presbyterian Book of Common Worship (1993) testifies to a common “shape of the liturgy” that represents the accrued wisdom of the church catholic, led by the Spirit, regarding what we might call “the narrative sense” of Christian worship.

[302]. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 204–5. Revisiting Brooks’s account, Angela Leighton notes that after Brooks’s critique, “paraphrase, as a serious critical idea, has never really made a comeback.” Angela Leighton, “About About: On Poetry and Paraphrase,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (2009): 167–76 (quote at 168). For rigorous philosophical updating of Brooks’s notion, see Ernie Lepore, “The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the Message,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (2009): 177–97.

[303]. Leighton, “About About,” 169.

[304]. In the McHugh poem, this includes the sheer verbal play on “about” that constitutes the heart of this poem.

[305]. Ibid., 202.

[306]. Or, echoing Zuidervaart’s notion of “art-internal” truth (in Artistic Truth, 8–9), I’m suggesting that there is a kind of “liturgy-internal” wisdom to Christian worship that is irreducible and even eludes articulation. And yet we know it’s true. Its truth resonates in the imagination; it is absorbed in our gut. We need to learn to trust our gut. We need to learn to trust those “intuitions” that bubble up from our liturgical formation. And then we need to think about how to “expand” this “liturgy-internal” wisdom across our life together.

[307]. There is no tension in claiming that Christian worship was intentionally developed and planned and yet can mean more than what was intended by those who developed it. The same is true of a poem: the best poetry is the fruit of painstaking craft and intentionality in its creation, and yet its meaning will always exceed what the author intended because the dynamics of metaphor and form elude our control. Indeed, the same dynamic is true of Scripture. For a discussion, see James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 199–221.

[308]. This is not to say that there is no room for innovation or improvisation in Christian worship or that affirming the formative wisdom of historic Christian worship requires merely repeating status quo forms. The point is rather that improvisations and innovations of worship form need to be attentive to the narrative arc of the form and the unique “incarnate significance” of worship practices. Innovations that are “faithful” will preserve the plot of that narrative arc and deepen the imaginative impact of worship. Unfaithful and unhelpful innovations will be developments that are detrimental to the imaginative coherence of worship.

[309]. See Brian Wren’s unpacking of this famous epigram in Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregational Song (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), particularly his discussion of how hymns “work” as “poems of faith” (253–94). My thanks to Kevin Twit for pointing me to this resource.

[310]. For a masterful account of these matters, see Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), part 3. For further relevant discussion, see Begbie, “Faithful Feelings: Music and Emotion in Worship,” in Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, ed. Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 323–54; and Steven R. Guthrie, “The Wisdom of Song,” in Begbie and Guthrie, Resonant Witness, 382–407.

[311]. For wisdom on these matters, see Debra Rienstra and Ron Rienstra, Worship Words: Discipling Language for Faithful Ministry (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), particularly their discussion of metaphor (115–41).

[312]. David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), 127.

[313]. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in The Portable Oscar Wilde, rev. ed., ed. Richard Aldington and Stanley Weintraub (London: Penguin, 1981), 81.

[314]. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 120.

[315]. Ibid. (emphasis added). Gilbert, the voice of Wilde in this dialogue, continues: “I need hardly say, Ernest, how far we in England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to him that the true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit” (121). For a proposal that embraces just such a vision, seeing the unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, see Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009).

[316]. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 121–22.

[317]. Ibid., 122.

[318]. The covers of the Cultural Liturgies trilogy are adorned with a series of tapestries that were the fruit of a collaboration between William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

[319]. Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 124.

[320]. For a more detailed discussion of religion as a kind of “mood” and attunement, see James K. A. Smith, “Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a ‘Post-Secular’ Sociology of Religion,” in The Post-Secular in Question, ed. Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 159–84.

[321]. And once again, we might learn something from John Calvin’s Geneva. For example, Karin Maag notes that students at the Genevan academy rehearsed psalms for an hour each day. See Karin Maag, “Change and Continuity in Medieval and Early Modern Worship: The Practice of Worship in the Schools,” in Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice, ed. Karin Maag and John D. Witvliet (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 123.

[322]. “Morning Prayer: Rite II,” in The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 79.

[323]. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we do the exact same thing week after week. There are macro- and microrhythms of repetition. We might pray the same prayer of confession each week, repeat the church’s calendar each year, and work our way through the Scriptures with the help of a lectionary every three years.

[324]. For an illuminating account of how this should inform the teaching of worship (for both worship leaders and worshipers), see John Witvliet, “Teaching as a Worship Practice,” in For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry, ed. Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 117–48.

[325]. For a classic discussion, see Craig A. Satterlee, Ambrose of Milan’s Method of Mystagogical Preaching (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002). More recently, consider the case study from Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church, a congregation in contemporary Seattle, as recounted in Paul E. Hoffman, Faith Forming Faith: Bringing New Christians to Baptism and Beyond (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012).

[326]. The Heidelberg Catechism can be seen in a similar way. Organized around the Creed, the Law, and the Lord’s Prayer, the catechism was drawing on what Christians would have rehearsed every week in worship. Insofar as congregations abandon this “spine” of worship practice, the catechism seems abstract, even arbitrary.

[327]. Lester Ruth, Carrie Steenwyk, and John D. Witvliet, Walking Where Jesus Walked: Worship in Fourth-Century Jerusalem, The Church at Worship: Case Studies from Christian History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 130. This rich volume includes extensive excerpts from Cyril’s mystagogical sermons (130–37).

[328]. Such a goal is obviously germane to congregational life; however, this could also be the legitimate goal of a college chapel program.

[329]. For a consideration of the affective dynamics related to an “angle of entry,” see Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 29–51. One might also consider an analogous point of “entry” in literature: the suspension of disbelief as a “chosen” disposition in order to inhabit the world of the novel. For relevant discussion, see James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999).

[330]. John D. Witvliet, “The Cumulative Power of Transformation in Public Worship: Cultivating Gratitude and Expectancy for the Holy Spirit’s Work,” in Worship That Changes Lives: Multidisciplinary and Congregational Perspectives on Spiritual Transformation, ed. Alexis Abernathy (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 52.

[331]. Ibid., 52–53.

[332]. Boulton, Life in God, 228.

[333]. Albert Goldbarth, “Sentimental,” in Across the Layers: Poems Old and New (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 113–14. Used with permission.