James K. A. Smith famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.
-- James K. A. Smith

#Christian #Religious #Buddhist
Sometimes to be creative you have to give yourself permission to not be outstanding.
-- James K. A. Smith

#Giving #Creative #Sometimes
In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.
-- James K. A. Smith

#People #Kind #Liturgy
What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?
-- James K. A. Smith

#Imagination #What If #Saturation
Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.
-- James K. A. Smith

#Christian #Appreciate #Optimism
Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation.
-- James K. A. Smith

#Narrative #Myth
What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?
-- James K. A. Smith

#What If #Firsts
Education is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world - all before we ever start 'thinking' about it
-- James K. A. Smith

#Thinking #Imagination #Desire

We must surrender ourselves so utterly that we can never own ourselves again. We must hand over self and all its rights in an eternal covenant, and give God the absolute right to own us, control us and possess us forever.
All play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.
Hell is the place where one has ceased to hope.
A Christian home! What a power it is to the child when he is far away in the cold, tempting world, and voices of sin are filling his ears, and his feet stand on slippery places.
Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
Calvinism is an all-embracing system of principles... It is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and form that specific religious consciousness there was developed first a particular theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life.
When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.
In regards to this great Book [the Bible], I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are found portrayed in it.
Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases.
I believe forgiveness is possible for everybody, for everything, but I'm a Buddhist.

James K. A. Smith famous quotes

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