Currently Reading:
Flickr Photos
Category Archives: Teaching
Long for the Sea with Me
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” … Continue reading
Reconnecting Worship and Worldview
I’m about halfway through my (digital) copy of James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love (which releases in print on April 5). Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom has been one of the most formative books on practice that I’ve read … Continue reading
Benedict Option Debrief
A couple of days ago, I posted a video of Rod Dreher talking about “the Benedict Option.” It’s been both an interesting and controversial topic, a kind of Rorschach test for Christians and their understandings of the relationship between church … Continue reading
Tapping into the Heart
Here’s a second video from Brazos Press leading up to the release of James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love. Along with its predecessor, the video is a nice taste of what Smith seems to have been thinking … Continue reading
Formation and What You Love
These past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to work through the concept of formation with some of my peers. It’s been an interesting journey made even more interesting by the thoughts of James K. A. Smith. Smith’s new book, … Continue reading
Generating Hope
Every spring, I ask my students questions from an old “discussion questions for youth groups” book. This past week, one of the questions concerned what period of time students would live in if they could choose a pre-2000 life. The … Continue reading
Independence and Inheritance
Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a kind of (time) bubble. Contemporary society floats above the mire of history untethered, we think. In this selection from For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy might beg to differ: What we should … Continue reading
Maneuvering the Public/Private Divide
One of the trickier parts of being a teacher is how the work you do seeps into life beyond the classroom. It is not uncommon to hear teachers say something like “sometimes I wish I had work that I could … Continue reading
Doing Good Work
From Purdy’s For Common Things: One thing that a culture does is give people ways of thinking about what they are doing. They can see the connections among their work, their talents and the needs of the world. They perceive … Continue reading
The Contemporary Question of the Self
One of the basic questions every worldview tries to answer (thank you, James Sire) concerns the nature of humanity. In class we often talk about whether man is good or evil by nature, how much choice we actually have in … Continue reading
Space Enough, and Time 