Bøger af James K. A. Smith

You are what you love. But you might not love what you think.In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the "imagination station" that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship. Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom, Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that book's content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smith's popular presentations on the ideas in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life.

A popular speaker and award-winning author invites readers to meet the ancient African thinker who can help us find ourselves and a faith that speaks to our deepest hungers and hopes.

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.

★ Publishers Weekly starred review"This incisive and eloquent volume will expand readers' minds."--Publishers WeeklyMany Christians are disconnected from the past or imagine they are "above" history, immune to it, as if self-starters from clean slates in every generation. They suffer from a lack of awareness of time and the effects of history--both personal and collective--and thus are naive about current issues and fixated on the end times.Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that awakening to the spiritual significance of time is crucial for orienting faith in the 21st century. He encourages us to cultivate the spiritual discipline of memento tempori, a temporal awareness of the Spirit's presence--indebted to a past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present. To gain spiritual appreciation for our mortality. To synchronize our heart-clocks with the tempo of the Spirit, which changes in the different seasons of life. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, Smith provides insights for pastoring, counseling, spiritual formation, politics, and public life.

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.

Provides a helpful overview of Radical Orthodoxy, highlights its areas of agreement with Reformed theology, and assesses its value as a truly postmodern theology.

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 "e;form of life"e; (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 "e;the logic of incarnation,"e; a "e;Nicene option"e; 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.

Speech and Theology posits that the paradigm for the encounter between the material and the divine, or the immanent and transcendent, is found in the Incarnation.

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.

Top Christian thinkers show how attending to the formation of virtue through the practices of Christian worship creates the hospitable space we need to deal with difference and disagreement in the body of Christ.

Written by two philosophers and a theologian, this book provides easy access to key terms in philosophy and how they are understood and used in theology. The focused entries discuss what the terms have meant in classical and contemporary philosophy and then shift to what these philosophical understandings have meant in the history of Christian...

A leading Christian philosopher 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.

A leading Christian philosopher introduces the philosophical sources behind contemporary theology, offering a fresh analysis of relativism and pragmatism.

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.

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

In the first of a three-volume systematic theology of culture, leading Reformed philosopher James K. A. Smith casts a new vision for worldview through the lens of Christian liturgy.

Builds on the work of Brian McLaren, Robert Webber, and others in assessing the contemporary church scene to discover what postmodernity has to say to the church.