__A Liturgical Theology of Culture__   
"Imagining the Kingdom is a fit successor to Jamie Smith's remarkable Desiring the Kingdom. The new book is, like its predecessor, learned but lively, provocative but warmhearted, a manifesto and a guide. Smith takes Christians deeper into the artistic, imaginative, and practical resources on which we must draw if we wish to renew not only our minds but also our whole beings in Christ."  
--__Alan Jacobs__, Honors College of Baylor University  
  
"In this wonderfully rich and engagingly readable book of 'liturgical anthropology,' Smith makes a persuasive case for the thesis that human beings are best understood as worshiping animals. It has important implications at once for practical theology's reflection on religious formation, liturgy, and pedagogy and for philosophical theorizing about just what religion is. And it develops as an engaging and lively conversation among an astonishing mix of people: imagine Calvin, Proust, Merleau-Ponty, Augustine, Wendell Berry, Bourdieu, and David Foster Wallace all in the same room really talking to each other about being human and how to think about it!"  
--__David Kelsey__, Yale Divinity School  
  
"Jamie Smith shows us that the gospel does not primarily happen between our ears but in all the movements of the body by which we are formed and in turn form the world. I know of no more thorough and sophisticated account of how secular liturgies form and deform us and how Christian liturgies can help. Though sophisticated, Smith's book is also a delight. Its pages are filled with great poetry and insights from films, novels, and everyday life."  
--__William T. Cavanaugh__, DePaul University  
  
"A thought-provoking, generative reflection on the imagination-shaping power of Christian worship practices. What an ideal book for crossing boundaries among academic disciplines and between the academy and the church."  
--__John D. Witvliet__, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Calvin College, and Calvin Theological Seminary  
  
"It is heartening to set one's eyes on Jamie Smith's bold and creative endeavor to awaken Christians, Protestants in particular, to the centrality of worship in even, nay especially, our moral lives. This thoughtful book is rightly concerned with a restoration of the Christian imagination rooted in habits of virtue."  
--__Vigen Guroian__, University of Virginia

__James K. A. Smith__ (PhD, Villanova University) is the Gary &amp; Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology &amp; Worldview at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In addition, he is editor of Comment magazine and a senior fellow of the Colossian Forum. Smith is the author or editor of many books, including the Christianity Today Book Award winners Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? and Desiring the Kingdom, and is editor of the well-received The Church and Postmodern Culture series (www.churchandpomo.org).

__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 the second of a three-volume theology of culture, a leading Reformed philosopher shows how worship works in shaping us through liturgical practices.

__Contents  
  
How to Read This Book__  For Practitioners  
 For Scholars  
__Introduction: A Sentimental Education: On Christian Action__  The End of Christian Education and/as the End of Worship  
 Situating Intellect: Educating for Action  
 Imagining the Kingdom  
__Part 1: Incarnate Significance: The Body as Background  
1. Erotic Comprehension__  Perceiving (by) Stories  
 The Geography of Desire: Between Instinct and Intellect  
 My Body, My Horizon  
 Being-in-the-World with Schneider: A Case Study  
 Erotic Comprehension: On Sex, Stories, and Silence  
 The Primacy of Perception  
__2. The Social Body__  The Critique of Theoretical Reason  
 Habitus as Practical Sense  
 Belief and the Body: The Logic of Practice  
 Incorporation and Initiation: Writing on the Body  
__Part 2: Sanctified Perception  
3. "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live": How Worship Works__  Imaginative, Narrative Animals  
 The Primacy of Metaphor and the Aesthetics of Human Understanding  
 A General Poetics: Imagination, Metaphor, Narrative  
 The iPhone-ization of Our World(view): Compressed Stories and Micropractices  
__4. Restor(y)ing the World: Christian Formation for Mission__  Sanctifying Perception: Re-Narration Takes Practice  
 Redeeming Ritual: Form Matters  
 Redeeming Repetition: On Habituation  
 Redeeming Reflection: On Liturgical Catechesis and Christian Education  
Indexes

Smith, James K. A.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Sidebars

Preface

Acknowledgments

How to Read This Book

Introduction

PART 1: Incarnate Significance

1. Erotic Comprehension

2. The Social Body

PART 2: Sanctified Perception

3. "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live"

4. Restor(y)ing the World

Name Index

Subject Index

Notes

Back Cover

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-receivedDesiring 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 asThe King's Speech,Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace'sInfinite Jest, and Facebook.

Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies) [eBook]

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