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.

Christianity Today Book Award Winner ● Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Center Book Award

You are what you love. But you might not love what you think.

Who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. We may not realize, however, the ways our hearts are taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us.

In this book, popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith helps us recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices.

Includes:
● film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers
● new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work
● individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life

★ Publishers Weekly starred review

One of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers Weekly

Christianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation)

Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth)

Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for Religion

This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect.

Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. What makes Augustine a guide worth considering, says Smith, is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way. Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes.

Malls, stadiums, and universities are actually liturgical structures that influence and shape our thoughts and affections. Humans--as Augustine noted--are desiring agents, full of longings and passions; in brief, we are what we love.

James K. A. Smith focuses on the themes of liturgy and desire in Desiring the Kingdom, the first book in what will be a three-volume set on the theology of culture. He redirects our yearnings to focus on the greatest good: God. Ultimately, Smith seeks to re-vision education through the process and practice of worship. Students of philosophy, theology, worldview, and culture will welcome Desiring the Kingdom, as will those involved in ministry and other interested readers.

★ Publishers Weekly starred review

2023 Christian Book Award(R) Winner (Christian Living)
Christianity Today 2023 Book Award Finalist (Christian Living & Spiritual Formation)
Outreach 2023 Recommended Resource (Christian Living)
A Best Book of 2022, Englewood Review of Books

This incisive and eloquent volume will expand readers' minds.--Publishers Weekly

A beautifully written book. . . . [Smith] offers a good, pastoral word to Christians today.--Christian Century

Many Christians live a faith that is nowhen. They are disconnected from the past or imagine they are somehow above the flux of history, as if every generation starts with a clean state. They lack an awareness of time and the effects of history--both personal and collective--and thus are naive about current issues, prone to nostalgia, or fixated on the end times and other doomsday versions of the future.

Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith explains that we must reckon with the past in order to discern the present and have hope for the future. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, he helps us develop a sense of temporal awareness that is attuned to the texture of history, the vicissitudes of life, and the tempo of the Spirit.

Smith shows that awakening to the spiritual significance of time is crucial for orienting faith in the twenty-first century. It allows us to become indebted to the past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present.

James Smith, nos regala esta magnífica ayuda para la elaboración de sermones, bajo un análisis homilético y amplio de cada libro de la Biblia, facilitando 13 tomos en uno solo.

Contiene más de 2,100 bosquejos con enfoques devocionales, temáticos, expositivos, evangelísticos entre muchos más. El autor nos comparte también una serie de ideas y pensamientos importantes, que el pastor o predicador podrá en algún momento personalizar y adaptar en su predicación. Al mismo tiempo, el lector podrá consultar anécdotas e ilustraciones que le permitirán perfeccionar la predicación de cualquier tema.

Es un libro de gran ayuda para los que inician en el ejercicio de la predicación; y también para los que tienen ya una trayectoria en la enseñanza de la Palabra y desean seguir creciendo en el conocimiento de la Palabra de Dios.

Contenido:

• Prólogo.
• Sermones y bosquejos sobre el Antiguo Testamento
• Sermones y bosquejos sobre el Nuevo Testamento
• Bosquejos temáticos en orden alfabético.
• Anécdotas e Ilustraciones.
• Índice de palabras clave.
• Índice de versículos clave.
• Índice de títulos de los bosquejos.

Handfuls on Purpose

James Smith gives us this magnificent aid for the elaboration of sermons, under a homiletical and extensive analysis of each book of the Bible, facilitating 13 volumes in one.

It contains more than 2,100 sketches with devotional, thematic, expository, evangelistic approaches, among many more. The author also shares with us a series of important ideas and thoughts, which the pastor or preacher may at some point personalize and adapt in his preaching. At the same time, the reader will be able to consult anecdotes and illustrations that will allow him to perfect the preaching of any subject.

It is a book of great help for those who begin in the exercise of preaching; and also for those who already have a career in teaching the Word and want to continue growing in the knowledge of the Word of God.

Content:

• Foreword.
• Sermons and Outlines on the Old Testament
• Sermons and outlines on the New Testament
• Thematic sketches in alphabetical order.
• Anecdotes and Illustrations.
• Keyword Index.
• Index of key verses.
• Outline titles index.
• Spanish Edition.

2013 Word Guild Award (Academic)

How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both secular and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the world. Worship works by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation.

Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook.

In this culmination of his widely read and highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies project, James K. A. Smith examines politics through the lens of liturgy. What if, he asks, citizens are not only thinkers or believers but also lovers? Smith explores how our analysis of political institutions would look different if we viewed them as incubators of love-shaping practices--not merely governing us but forming what we love. How would our political engagement change if we weren't simply looking for permission to express our views in the political sphere but actually hoped to shape the ethos of a nation, a state, or a municipality to foster a way of life that bends toward shalom?

This book offers a well-rounded public theology as an alternative to contemporary debates about politics. Smith 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. This book creatively merges theological and philosophical reflection with illustrations from film, novels, and music and includes helpful exposition and contemporary commentary on key figures in political 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 form of life (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 the logic of incarnation, a Nicene option 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.

The past several decades have seen a renaissance in Christian philos-ophy, led by the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, and others. In the spirit of Plantinga's famous manifesto, Advice to Christian Philosophers, James K. A. Smith here offers not only advice to Pentecostal philosophers but also some Pentecostal advice to Christian philosophers.

In this inaugural Pentecostal Manifestos volume Smith begins from the conviction that implicit in Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality is a tacit worldview or social imaginary. Thinking in Tongues unpacks and articulates the key elements of this Pentecostal worldview and then explores their implications for philosophical reflection on ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, language, science, and philosophy of religion. In each case, Smith demonstrates how the implicit wisdom of Pentecostal spirituality makes unique contributions to current conversations in Christian philosophy.

Following his successful Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? leading Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith introduces the philosophical sources behind postliberal theology. Offering a provocative analysis of relativism, Smith provides an introduction to the key voices of pragmatism: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom.

Many Christians view relativism as the antithesis of absolute truth and take it to be the antithesis of the gospel. Smith argues that this reaction is a symptom of a deeper theological problem: an inability to honor the contingency and dependence of our creaturehood. Appreciating our created finitude as the condition under which we know (and were made to know) should compel us to appreciate the contingency of our knowledge without sliding into arbitrariness. Saying It depends is not the equivalent of saying It's not true or I don't know. It is simply to recognize the conditions of our knowledge as finite, created, social beings. Pragmatism, says Smith, helps us recover a fundamental Christian appreciation of the contingency of creaturehood.

This addition to an acclaimed series engages key thinkers in modern philosophy with a view to ministry and addresses the challenge of relativism in a creative, original way.

As Christians engage controversial cultural issues, we must remember that all things hold together in Christ (Col. 1:17)--even when it comes to science and faith. In this anthology, top Christian thinkers--including Robert Barron, Timothy George, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Mark Noll, and N. T. Wright--invite us to find resources for faithful, creative thinking in the riches of the church's theological heritage and its worship traditions.

This boxed set includes all three volumes from James K. A. Smith's highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies series: Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and Awaiting the King.

In Desiring the Kingdom (winner of a Christianity Today Book Award), Smith casts a new vision for worldview through the lens of Christian liturgy, re-visioning education through the process and practice of worship.

Imagining the Kingdom shows how worship works in shaping us through liturgical practices. Smith helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both secular and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the world.

Awaiting the King 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.

God is infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn Him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence ever be made known? Does its very appearance not undermine its transcendence, its condition of unknowability?
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: God's voluntary self-immersion in the human world as an expression of His love for His creation. By this key act of grace, hinged upon Christs condescension to human finitude, philosophy acquires the means not simply to speak of perfection, which is to speak theologically, but to bridge the gap between word and thing in general sense.

After Modernity? addresses a cluster of questions and issues found at the nexus of globalization and religion. This unique volume examines various religious--especially Christian--evaluations of and responses to globalization. In particular, the book considers the links among globalization, capitalism and secularization-and the ways in which religion is (or can be) deployed to address a range of hot button topics. With cross-disciplinary analyses, the collection argues consistently for the necessity of a post-secular evaluation of globalization that unapologetically draws on the resources of Christian faith. The conservative radicalism represented in these contributions will resonate with a broad audience of scholars and citizens who seek to put faith into action.

The Devil Reads Derrida brings together essays and articles written for a general audience by a notable young voice in the church and the academy. A specialist in French philosophy and postmodernism, James K. A. Smith has also consistently sought to speak to the church as the most important public for his work.

This book brings together some of Smith's most significant forays into the public arena, focusing especially on discipleship, the university, and politics and the church. It also provides a selection of his criticism, including essays on Harry Potter, A History of Violence, the poetry of Franz Wright, and much more.

Smith's work as a Christian public intellectual brings theological wisdom into the service of lived discipleship. Whether grappling with the Wild at Heart phenomenon or the challenges of secularization, dealing with sex or consumerism, or commenting on The Devil Wears Prada orAmerican Beauty, Smith tackles each issue with clarity and insight, with scholarly rigor -- but always with an eye to Christian discipleship and the life of the church.

What might be described as a Pentecostal worldview has become a powerful cultural phenomenon, but it is often at odds with modernity and globalization. Science and the Spirit confronts questions of spirituality in the face of contemporary science. The essays in this volume illustrate how Pentecostalism can usefully engage with technology and scientific discovery and consider what might be distinctive about a Pentecostal dialogue with the sciences. The authors conclude that Pentecostals, with their unique perspectives on spirituality, can contribute new insights for a productive interaction between theology and science.

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.

After Modernity? addresses a cluster of questions and issues found at the nexus of globalization and religion. This unique volume examines various religious--especially Christian--evaluations of and responses to globalization. In particular, the book considers the links among globalization, capitalism and secularization-and the ways in which religion is (or can be) deployed to address a range of hot button topics. With cross-disciplinary analyses, the collection argues consistently for the necessity of a post-secular evaluation of globalization that unapologetically draws on the resources of Christian faith. The conservative radicalism represented in these contributions will resonate with a broad audience of scholars and citizens who seek to put faith into action.

In this accessible, insightful book, noted Christian scholar and award-winning author James K. A. Smith gathers together a range of his writing for popular audiences. Working at the intersection of faith and culture, past and present, church and world, Smith offers both incisive cultural criticism and winsome articulation of a robust Christian faith in our secular age. Whether he's making a case for the enduring treasures of the Christian tradition in postmodernity, or talking about the virtues of hipster Christianity, or inviting us to consider the poetry of Charles Wright, or offering advice to young parents, Smith's prose is always probing, provocative, and illuminating.