9 Quotes by James K. A. Smith

What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

Education is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world – all before we ever start ‘thinking’ about it.

In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.

What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?

Our Christian faith – and correlatively, our account of apologetics – is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.

Sometimes to be creative you have to give yourself permission to not be outstanding.

We all – whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians – see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework – and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.

Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation.

How to die is a question of how to life, but how to live is a matter of knowing how to love: how to find a love that isn’t haunted by fear, a love that is stronger than death – figuring out how to love rightly and love lightly with all the mortal beauties of creation without despising or resenting their mortality either. To love and live in a way that faces up to our death, and the mortality that hangs over our finitude...