Davis Editing

A while back, I had the opportunity to proofread James K. A. Smith’s book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016). Smith’s argument is compelling. (The book is a simplified and engaging version—written from scratch, to be sure—of Smith’s more academic work Desiring the Kingdom.)

In the book, Smith urges us to see life through a liturgical lens. Liturgy isn’t just what happens in traditional churches on Sunday mornings. In fact, we’re immersed in liturgy, or habit-forming rituals, all the time—for example, when we’re shopping at the mall, surrounded by non-neutral images of the good life.

Smith’s book made me think about seemingly nonliturgical (“low”) churches of the nondenominational type (my own upbringing). These churches do actually have a standard structure for their services and in that way are liturgical. One might liken this to the quip about Protestant Sunday-school flannelgraphs being like Catholic or Orthodox icons: Flannelgraphs are art all the same, just not very good art.

The central message of You Are What You Love is implied by the title: humans are fundamentally desiring beings (contra Descartes’s cogito ergo sum). So the question is, what do you desire? The answer may reveal who you are.