James K. A. Smith

As Christians engage controversial cultural issues, we must remember that "all things hold together in Christ" (Col. 1:17)--even when it comes to science and faith. In this anthology, top Christian thinkers--including Robert Barron, Timothy George, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Mark Noll, and N. T. Wright--invite us to find resources for faithful, creative thinking in the riches of the church's theological heritage and its worship traditions.

The Avett Brothers sing of a spiritual yearning present in modern culture. Without being overtly religious, theological underpinnings are prevalent in their music. The contributors in this book delve into the Avett Brother's explicit and implicit theology with an eye on how they help make sense of our secular age. Theology and the Avett Brothers offers a rich contemplation on how these brothers from North Carolina help listeners navigate the religious consciousness of today's world, exploring themes like the good life, virtue formation, empathy, ministry models, and dying.

? Publishers Weekly starred review2023 Christian Book Award® Winner (Christian Living)Christianity Today 2023 Book Award Finalist (Christian Living & Spiritual Formation)Outreach 2023 Recommended Resource (Christian Living)A "Best Book of 2022," Englewood Review of Books"This incisive and eloquent volume will expand readers' minds."--Publishers Weekly"A beautifully written book. . . . [Smith] offers a good, pastoral word to Christians today."--Christian CenturyMany Christians live a faith that is "nowhen." They are disconnected from the past or imagine they are somehow "above" the flux of history, as if every generation starts with a clean state. They lack an awareness of time and the effects of history--both personal and collective--and thus are naive about current issues, prone to nostalgia, or fixated on the end times and other doomsday versions of the future. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith explains that we must reckon with the past in order to discern the present and have hope for the future. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, he helps us develop a sense of "temporal awareness" that is attuned to the texture of history, the vicissitudes of life, and the tempo of the Spirit. Smith shows that awakening to the spiritual significance of time is crucial for orienting faith in the twenty-first century. It allows us to become indebted to the past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present.

Christian philosophy and philosophy of religion tend to be dominated by analytic approaches, which have brought a valuable logical rigor to the discussion of matters of belief. However, the perspectives of continental philosophy—in particular, the continental emphasis on embodied forms of knowing—still have much to offer to the conversation and our understanding of what it means to be both rational and faithful in a postmodern world. The Nicene Option represents the full sweep of James K. A. Smith's work in continental philosophy of religion over the past twenty years. Animated by the conviction that a philosophy of religion needs to be philosophical reflection on the practice of religion, as a "form of life" (as Wittgenstein would say), this book makes the case for the distinct contribution that phenomenology—as a philosophy of experience—can make to philosophy of religion and Christian philosophy. Engaging a range of philosophers in this tradition, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Smith's constructive proposal coheres around what he describes as "the logic of incarnation," a "Nicene option" in contemporary philosophy of religion. By grounding philosophy of religion in the doctrinal heart of Christian confession, Smith gestures toward a uniquely robust Christian philosophy. Besides issuing a clarion call for the renaissance of continental philosophy of religion, The Nicene Option also offers a glimpse behind the scholarly curtain for a wider audience of readers familiar with Smith's popular works such as Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?, Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and You Are What You Love—all of which are tacitly informed by the phenomenological approach articulated in this book. As an extended footnote to those works—which for many readers have been gateways to philosophy— The Nicene Option presents an invitation to a new depth of reflection.

Author James K Smith says, "don't add complexity unless that complexity is worth the dysfunction it addresses." James has assembled the essential field manual for lean-agile coaches and business systems engineers who want to move beyond the current offering of certifications and agile frameworks to what he calls Agile V2 - the scalable, structured organizational conversation that delivers customer value in a simple, coherent, and measurable way. In field manual fashion, James covers step-by-step how to set up alignment points and a complete organizational backlog from investment, to portfolio, to delivery. He details when to use Kanban and Scrum processes, how to elaborate the conversation for optimal execution flow using built-in metrics, and why Scrum is the most predictable execution tool for providing value to the customer. The field manual includes templates for flow and elaboration of strategic initiatives, epics, sub-epics, features, and stories, along with ceremony templates used by high-performing scrum teams. Also included are techniques and templates for elaborating kaizen or A3 stories. Additionally, you'll get valuable insights on how to codify trust, transparency, commitment, and continuous improvement right into the organizational conversation. Finally, the manual connects all the pieces to illustrate a working lean-agile organization without the use of any of the canned, legacy frameworks. Closing thoughts introduce the concept of test-driven transformation. The AGILE V2 COACH'S FIELD MANUAL is the definitive reference that should be carried in every agile coach's backpack.

Du blir vad du älskar. Men du kanske inte älskar det du tror dig älska. Vem och vad vi tillber formar våra hjärtan. Och även om vi strävar efter att forma kulturen är vi ofta omedvetna om hur mycket kulturen egentligen formar oss. Det är inte säkert att vi ser hur våra hjärtan får lära sig att älska avgudar i stället för vår skapare. Den här boken visar vilken formativ kraft som ligger i kulturen och vilka möjligheter till förvandling som finns i den kristna traditionen. James K. A. Smith menar bland annat att tillbedjan är den ”kreativitetsstation” som utvecklar vår kärlek och längtan så att det vi gör är format av och för Gud och hans rike. Detta är anledningen till varför kyrkan och tillbedjan i en lokal gemenskap med andra troende borde vara navet för och hjärtat i det kristna lärjungaskapet. ?? Du blir vad du älskar utsågs till Årets bok 2017 av Christianity Today.?? Om författaren I en artikel i tidskriften NOD introducerades nyligen Smith så här: »Filosofen och författaren James K. A. Smith har etablerat sig som en av de mest kreativa kristna tänkarna i den amerikanska kontexten. Hans böcker kännetecknas av föreningen mellan filosofisk teori, teologisk insikt och samtida kulturanalys.« »Smith har en alldeles speciell förmåga att förklara ritualens formativa kraft och lyfter på ett relevant sätt fram det liturgiska livets rikedomar för en ny generation.« Magnus Persson, inspiratör EFS?? JAMES K. A. SMITH är professor i filosofi vid Calvin College i Grand Rapids, USA. Han är författare till ett antal böcker som har haft stort inflytande i kristenheten. Hans föreläsningar om liturgisk medvetenhet är uppskattade i många traditioner världen över. James är en flitig skribent som aktivt deltar i samtalet kring samtid och kultur med regelbundna krönikor i flera namnkunniga magasin och tidningar. Han är sedan 2018 chefredaktör för tidsskriften Image Journal och hade tidigare samma uppdrag för Comment Journal. "God teologi är nödvändig för att inte gå vilse i en allt rörigare samtid. James K. A. Smith är en av vår tids främsta teologer, och en av dem jag själv läst med störst behållning. Han är rotad i traditionen och skicklig på att tyda tidens tecken. Kort sagt en pålitlig vägvisare för den som vill förstå sig själv och världen - och som söker hjälp att närma sig Gud." JOEL HALLDORF, skribent i Dagen och Expressen samt lärare vid Enskilda högskolan Stockholm. "Jag är övertygad om att James K. A. Smith har något viktigt att säga oss alla. Boktiteln fungerar både som en sammanfattning av hans poäng och en utmaning till oss alla som vill leva helhjärtade kristna liv. Alltså: en bok för den som inte bara vill förstå sitt liv utan förändra det." LARSOLOV ERIKSSON, ordförande EFS riksstyrelse ?? Vi behöver veta hur den kristna tron sitter ihop, och framför allt hur det vi möter i livet hör ihop med Gud. Sådan kunskap hjälper oss att leva, tro och vittna. I denna bok möter du en sammanfattning av den kristna tron. De centrala delarna av tron framställs i korta kapitel. De olika kristna lärornas praktiska följder för våra liv lyfts också fram. Den kristna tron är inte en torr teori, utan en levande verklighet. ??

? Publishers Weekly starred reviewOne of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers WeeklyChristianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation)Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth)Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for ReligionThis is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect. Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. "What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way." Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes.

An alternative, uniquely Christian response to the growing global challenges of deep religious differenceIn the last fifty years, millions of Muslims have migrated to Europe and North America. Their arrival has ignited a series of fierce public debates on both sides of the Atlantic about religious freedom and tolerance, terrorism and security, gender and race, and much more. How can Christians best respond to this situation? In this book theologian and ethicist Matthew Kaemingk offers a thought-provoking Christian perspective on the growing debates over Muslim presence in the West. Rejecting both fearful nationalism and romantic multiculturalism, Kaemingk makes the case for a third way--a Christian pluralism that is committed to both the historic Christian faith and the public rights, dignity, and freedom of Islam.

This boxed set includes all three volumes from James K. A. Smith's highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies series: Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and Awaiting the King. In Desiring the Kingdom (winner of a Christianity Today Book Award), Smith casts a new vision for worldview through the lens of Christian liturgy, re-visioning education through the process and practice of worship. Imagining the Kingdom shows how worship works in shaping us through liturgical practices. Smith helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the world. Awaiting the King explores the religious nature of politics and the political nature of Christian worship, sketching how the worship of the church propels us to be invested in forging the common good.

In this culmination of his widely read and highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies project, James K. A. Smith examines politics through the lens of liturgy. What if, he asks, citizens are not only thinkers or believers but also lovers? Smith explores how our analysis of political institutions would look different if we viewed them as incubators of love-shaping practices--not merely governing us but forming what we love. How would our political engagement change if we weren't simply looking for permission to express our "views" in the political sphere but actually hoped to shape the ethos of a nation, a state, or a municipality to foster a way of life that bends toward shalom? This book offers a well-rounded public theology as an alternative to contemporary debates about politics. Smith explores the religious nature of politics and the political nature of Christian worship, sketching how the worship of the church propels us to be invested in forging the common good. This book creatively merges theological and philosophical reflection with illustrations from film, novels, and music and includes helpful exposition and contemporary commentary on key figures in political theology.

Christianity Today Book Award Winner ? Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Center Book AwardYou are what you love. But you might not love what you think. Who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. We may not realize, however, the ways our hearts are taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. In this book, popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith helps us recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. Includes:? film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers ? new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work? individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls -your hitchhiker's guide to the present- -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who -we- are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on.

Following his successful Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? leading Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith introduces the philosophical sources behind postliberal theology. Offering a provocative analysis of relativism, Smith provides an introduction to the key voices of pragmatism: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom. Many Christians view relativism as the antithesis of absolute truth and take it to be the antithesis of the gospel. Smith argues that this reaction is a symptom of a deeper theological problem: an inability to honor the contingency and dependence of our creaturehood. Appreciating our created finitude as the condition under which we know (and were made to know) should compel us to appreciate the contingency of our knowledge without sliding into arbitrariness. Saying "It depends" is not the equivalent of saying "It's not true" or "I don't know." It is simply to recognize the conditions of our knowledge as finite, created, social beings. Pragmatism, says Smith, helps us recover a fundamental Christian appreciation of the contingency of creaturehood. This addition to an acclaimed series engages key thinkers in modern philosophy with a view to ministry and addresses the challenge of relativism in a creative, original way.

2013 Word Guild Award (Academic)How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the world. Worship "works" by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation. Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook.

In this provocative book James K. A. Smith, one of the most engaging Christian scholars of our day, offers an innovative approach to hermeneutics. The second edition of Smith's well-received debut book provides updated interaction with contemporary hermeneutical discussions and responds to criticisms.

Who would have guessed that something as austere as Calvinism would become a hot topic in today's postmodern culture? At the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, new generations have discovered and embraced a "New Calvinism," finding in the Reformed tradition a rich theological vision. In fact, Time cited New Calvinism as one of "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now." This book provides pastoral and theological counsel, inviting converts to this tradition to find in Calvin a vision that's even bigger than the New Calvinism might suggest. Offering wisdom at the intersection of theology and culture, noted Reformed philosopher James K. A. Smith also provides pastoral caution about pride and maturity. The creative letter format invites young Calvinists into a faithful conversation that reaches back to Paul and Augustine, through Calvin and Edwards, extending to Kuyper and Wolterstorff. Together they sketch a comprehensive vision of Calvinism that is generous, winsome, and imaginative.

The past several decades have seen a renaissance in Christian philos-ophy, led by the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, and others. In the spirit of Plantinga's famous manifesto, -Advice to Christian Philosophers, - James K. A. Smith here offers not only advice to Pentecostal philosophers but also some Pentecostal advice to Christian philosophers. In this inaugural Pentecostal Manifestos volume Smith begins from the conviction that implicit in Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality is a tacit worldview or -social imaginary.- Thinking in Tongues unpacks and articulates the key elements of this Pentecostal worldview and then explores their implications for philosophical reflection on ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, language, science, and philosophy of religion. In each case, Smith demonstrates how the implicit wisdom of Pentecostal spirituality makes unique contributions to current conversations in Christian philosophy.