You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Este livro me trouxe uma visão sobre o papel do cristão no mundo e sobre os hábitos litúrgicos e sua importância para cumprirmos nosso chamado como filhos de Deus que me abriu os olhos

Ein spannendes Buch über Anbetung (mehr als Musik) und wie Dinge, die wir tun, nicht neutral, sondern auf ein Ziel ausgerichtet sind.Seine Beschreibung davon, wer Menschen sind und was sie wollen, lieben und verlangen, ist augenöffnend und herausfordernd gleichzeitig. Manchmal zu herausfordernd, ungemütlich und unbedingt im Kontext zu verstehen.James K.A. Smith weiß, was er tut, glaubt, lehrt und lebt und hat seine Sichtweise auf durchdachte und überführende und überzeugende Weise dargestellt. Es ist nicht das typische „ich sage euch, was ihr sowieso schon wisst“-Buch.Unbedingt zu empfehlen das Buch zu lesen, eventuell auch mit Leuten zu diskutieren.

I learned a good deal from this book about my daily habits, my culture and milieu, and their significance--on levels I would never have conceived of.We're being formed by everything in our environment, whether we like it, or know it, or not.Powerful people understand this fact, and harness it for their own benefit--at our expense.Don't worry; it's not that tricky to disengage from the wrong processes, and nurture good ones.I found this book very insightful and to reveal phenomena I found really interesting--and practical--to discover.

It’s life lesson book. I would highly recommend you to read.

I highly recommend this book if you have experienced the shallow offerings of some well-intentioned attractional models of church, and are left wanting. Thoughtfully articulated, this book calls believers to remember the rich inheritance of rhythms passed down to us that bend our hearts towards Christ through spiritual disciplines and corporate worship. I couldn’t put this book down! I was challenged in many ways, and particularly appreciated his discussion on practical ways to incorporate liturgical rhythms of grace in the home as a means of discipleship within the family.

I've read this book twice already and will likely return to it again. I underlined so many of the ideas and thoughts and was challenged to reconsider what I truly think and believe (and love). It would be wonderful to read this as part of a Bible study or book club as there is a lot of material to discuss and chew on.

Ever wondered why what you 'know' has such little influence on what you desire and what you do? Ever wondered how God desires to be worshiped or what the chief aim of worship is? If so, this book will inspire you to rethink your faith in the context of culture, your career, your world and in your practice.I have a more informed view of an old term I disliked a great deal, 'liturgy'. If we become what we love, restorative, life forming habits must be an essential component of our journey.

Easy to read, thoughtful and useful in thinking about the 'whole' person.

In "You are What You Love," James Smith contends that it is our hearts, not our heads, that rules the passions, habits, and routines of our lives. The author points out that contemporary thinking credits our mind as being the one at the driver’s seat in deciding how we should order and live our lives. However, Smith argues from Scripture, philosophy, and experience that it is our hearts that need to be recalibrated before any long-lasting, transformative change can take place. The premise of the book is that our surrounding culture pulls us away from God through ungodly liturgies and our best strategy to counter such attacks is by reorienting our hearts through developing godly liturgies and practices. The first step then is to discern what cultural liturgies we undertake regularly without much thought and determine what underlying values are informing such practices. For example, Smith explains how our visits to the mall can be viewed as worship in a modern-day pagan temple as it seeks to attract thousands of restless souls to come find fulfillment and happiness through consumerism. Nevertheless, those who enter are not only unsatisfied but leave with thoughts of envy, self-loathing, and despair. In each chapter, Smith goes on to dissect key areas of our lives to unmask how cultural liturgies inform the way we live. To effectively recalibrate our hearts Godward, Smith proposes that we need to return to the rich heritage of the Christian faith and adapt classical liturgies that the church has practiced through the centuries into the rhythms of everyday tasks and routines. The author argues that rooting ourselves in the trusted old paths of our Christian forerunners is the most effective approach to guide our heart affections through the onslaught of antagonistic provocations by our culture.I gladly recommend this book to all Christians as we find society’s worldviews to be increasingly hostile to the Christian faith. The New Testament is replete with warnings that the world is staunchly anti-Christ thus believers need to be vigilant and prepared to counter Satan’s attacks. Smith asserts that the war for our allegiance is not fought in the mind but in the heart. By integrating the classical liturgies of our robust Christian faith such as prayer and catechisms into our everyday routines, our heart affections will be reshaped to yearn for more of Christ and less of the world. Most importantly, we should not view these liturgies as the ultimate goals but the means of grace by which we can grow in the grace of God and by the power of His Spirit.

This is one of the most insightful books I have read in a long time. The subtitle says it all: "The spiritual power of habits." So few have ever reflected so creatively on cultural and religious rituals in a way that brings optimism and hope. Smith's book has the potential to re-shape a culture for the better. I have recommended this work to many of my friends and colleagues.

A deep book, deep thoughts and at times troubling. I will read it again, because some of its premises I question somewhat.

You Are What You Love by James K. A. Smith is a small book with large ambitions. It aims to reshape the way evangelical Christians understand discipleship, replacing their emphasis on thought with an emphasis on desire. Rather than saying, “You are what you think,” Smith urges Christians to say, “You are what you love.”For Smith, this reshaping of discipleship is not something new, but something old. Both the Bible and the pre-Enlightenment Christian tradition taught that “the center of the human person is located not in the intellect but in the heart.” For example, consider Jesus’ words in Matthew 15:19: “out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Or consider Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”Jesus’ words reveal that the heart orients us toward evil thoughts and evil deeds. Change the heart, and the thoughts and actions will follow. Augustine’s words remind us that our heart is oriented toward a telos, an end or goal, a vision of human flourishing. Because God made the heart, only the heart that seeks His telos—the kingdom—finds rest. Every other kingdom leaves our hearts weary and restless.The problem is, how do you disciple the heart? How do you properly form human desire? Through practice, which develops habits. A cousin of mine likes to say that practice makes permanent. That’s as true for playing the piano as for developing moral character. What we do repeatedly shapes who we are.According to Smith, the practices that shape our hearts can be called “liturgies,” a churchy term for the order of worship. Martin Luther said, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god.” There is a liturgy, then, that develops a good heart for the true God. There are also liturgies that develop bad hearts for false gods such as consumerism. Smith urges us to take a “liturgical audit” of our lives to make sure our practice is oriented toward the proper telos, God and His kingdom, not some lesser goal.Smith uses the term liturgies expansively. In the final three chapters of the book, he uses it to describe Christian practices in the home, at school, and in one’s vocation. The heart of his book concerns the worship practices of the gathered church, however. It is here that the Christian heart is most formed. Smith states that his book “articulates a spirituality for culture-makers, showing…why discipleship needs to be centered in and fueled by our immersion in the body of Christ. Worship is the ‘imagination station’ that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom.”For him, worship is about “formation” more than “expression.” It is God himself meeting us to shape us into the kind of people who do His will, not just an outpouring of our sincere feelings about Him. (Pentecostals might be tagged as “expressivists” because of their exuberant services, but it seems to me that their theology of spiritual gifts aligns with the notion that God is the agent of worship, not just its audience.) Seen this way, and mindful that practice is repetitious, Smith urges Christians to hew closely to the traditional “narrative arc” of worship—which consists of gathering, listening, communing, and sending—and to eschew “novelty.” (He’s not talking about the “worship wars,” by the way. This has to do with the structure of the worship service, not the style of its music.) That liturgy “character-izes” us, meaning, it shows us that we are “characters” in God’s story and then forms the appropriate “character” in us.Interestingly, Smith argues that Christian cultural innovators need to be rooted in Christian liturgical tradition: “the innovative, restorative work of culture-making needs to be primed by those liturgical traditions that orient our imagination to kingdom come. In order to foster a Christian imagination, we don’t need to invent; we need to remember. We cannot hope to re-create the world if we are constantly reinventing “church,” because we will reinvent ourselves right out of the Story. Liturgical tradition is the platform for imaginative innovation.”I hope I have accurately and adequately communicated the gist of You Are What You Love. It is a thoughtful, thought-provoking book that I would encourage pastors, church leaders, and interested laypeople to read. Having said that, though, I want to make two “yes, but” points.First, yes desire, but also thought. In other words, I agree with Smith that the heart is the heart of discipleship. This is a point on which evangelicals should unite, whether they are heirs to Jonathan (“religious affections”) Edwards or John (“heart strangely warmed”) Wesley. I am concerned, however, that Smith has swung the pendulum too far toward a discipleship of desire in order to compensate for the tendency in evangelicalism to swing the pendulum too far toward a discipleship of thought. This is, admittedly, an impressionistic critique. Smith is a philosopher and theologian in the Reformed tradition, after all, and the Reformed are known to be punctilious about doctrine. Still, I would’ve liked to see more on the discipleship of the mind in the book.Second, yes process, but also crisis. A process-orientation in discipleship focuses, as Smith does, on the development of spiritual habits. A crisis-orientation focuses on the necessity of decision. The characteristic forms of process-oriented discipleship are stable liturgies, the sacraments, and spiritual disciplines. The characteristic form of crisis-oriented discipleship, at least among evangelicals, is the altar call. As a Pentecostal, I would also add the call to come forward for Spirit-baptism or healing. There is little place for crisis in Smith’s book. Perhaps this is an overreaction to the crisis-orientation of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which often leave little room for process. Still, it seems to me that both are necessary to discipleship. Wesley was no slouch when it came to process. His followers weren’t called “Methodists” for nothing, after all. But he still stood outside the mines and called miners to repentance and faith. I didn’t see that in Smith’s book.These two “yes, buts” notwithstanding, I intend to re-read and meditate further on Smith’s book. As a Pentecostal, I disagree with certain aspects of Smith’s Reformed liturgical heritage (infant baptism, for example), even as I am challenged by the overall thrust of the book. The heart is the heart of the matter. Any discipleship that fails to take that truth into account fails to achieve its aim.

For me this book is a game changer, thank you Jamie Smith