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)
I finally got around to seeing Zootopia over spring break. It had the best trailer of the movies showing before Star Wars- The Force Awakens, but it ended up low on my “need to see” movie list. I’m glad I saw it: it was colorful, creative, and even kind of challenging in its storytelling. I did find it a little heavy-handed ideologically, more so than most animated movies in the 21st century.
The story of Kung Fu Panda 3 begins with adversaries on parallel paths. Po, the hero of the series, is set to take on the duties of teacher. At the same time, the villain Kai has returned from the spirit realm in order to steal all of the chi of the remaining masters. Po, of course, knows nothing of chi. Fortunately, Po’s long-lost father returns and takes him to the hidden village where the secrets of chi were said to have been kept. What starts as a sweet family reunion quickly sours when Po’s father confesses that the pandas of the hidden village have long forgotten the art of chi. The pandas are cute, cuddly, but ultimately clueless when they are called on to train Po in the only way that can bring him victory over Kai.
Douglas Coupland has been writing and drawing us into the future for some time. He has a particular knack for “getting things right” years before they happen. While I don’t always enjoy his short essays for the Financial Times, I did particularly enjoy his most recent entry, “Escaping the Superfuture.” His experience:
Space Enough, and Time 