James K. A. Smith’s new book, You Are What You Love, drops today.  It’s been available digitally for a couple of weeks, though.  The book is a great read, accurately simplifying and building off of Smith’s thesis about “cultural liturgies” as found in Desiring the Kingdom.  Smith builds his argument well, starting off with the assumption that we all long for things and that such longings are deeper than any intellectual assent that we might make.  Consider:

To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as “flourishing.” And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. We are oriented by our longings, directed by our desires. We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures your imagination. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, succinctly encapsulates the motive power of such allure: “If you want people to build a ship,” he counsels, “don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” We aren’t really motivated by abstract ideas or pushed by rules and duties. Instead some panoramic tableau of what looks like flourishing has an alluring power that attracts us, drawing us toward it, and we thus live and work toward that goal. We get pulled into a way of life that seems to be the way to arrive in that world. Such a telos works on us, not by convincing the intellect, but by allure . . . So again, it’s a question not of whether you long for some version of the kingdom but of which version you long for . . . You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

The idea of the good life weaves in and out of Smith’s argument, too.  It’s a phrase that has been twisted and co-opted in ways that can make it toxic towards some people of faith, like it’s about health and wealth when in reality it’s closer to something like human flourishing.

And so we ask the question: what world are we directing ourselves, feeling ourselves, to?  What kind of kingdom is the object of our affection?  What love is drawing us most?

(image from appszoom.com)