“We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends.”
“Human persons are not primarily, or for the most part, thinkers, or even believers. Instead, human persons are – fundamentally and primordially – lovers.”
“The point is to emphasize that the way we inhabit the world is not primarily as thinkers, or even believers, but as more affective, embodied creatures who make our way in the world more by feeling our way around it.”
“To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are…we are talking about ultimate loves – that to which we are fundamentally oriented, what ultimately governs our vision of the good life, what shames and molds our being-in-the-world – in other words, what we desire above all else, the ultimate desire that shapes and positions and makes sense of all our penultimate desires and actions.”
“The structure of love can take different directions, which means that such love can be misdirected…At the heart of our being is a kind of ‘love pump’ that can never be turned off…the effect of sin on our love pump is to knock it off-kilter, misdirecting it and getting it aimed at the wrong things.”
“We are attracted to a vision of the good life that has been painted for us in stories and myths, images and icons.”
“Our worldview is more a matter of the imagination than the intellect and imagination runs off the fuel of images that are channeled by the senses.”
“Discipleship and formation are less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively ‘understands’ the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel.”
“In a culture whose civic religion prizes consumption as the height of human flourishing, marketing taps into our erotic religious nature and seeks to shape us in such a way that this passion and desire is directed to strange gods, alternative worship, and another kingdom.”
“On the one hand,Victoria’s Secret ads appear during football games broadcast on ESPN and TSN. On the other hand, the majority of shoppers at Victoria’s Secret are women who want to be desirable. And all of this is communicated by very affective, visual means…The secret here is an industry that thrives on desire and knows how to get to it. A common ‘churchy’ response to this cultural situation runs along basically Platonic lines: to quell the raging passion of sexuality that courses its way through culture…we need to get the brain to trump other organs and thus bring the passions into submission to the intellect.”
“Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they get it: they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures – creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire…the church is…wrongly assuming that the heady realm of ideas and beliefs is the core of our being…the church has been trying to counter the consumer formations of the heart by focusing on the head and missing the target.”
“What if we approached this differently? What if we didn’t see passion and desire as such as the problem, but rather sought to redirect it?”
“But a romantic theology refuses the distinction [between eros and agape] because it recognizes that we are erotic creatures – that agape is rightly ordered eros.”
“All habits and practices are ultimately trying to make us into a certain kind of person. So one of the most important questions we need to ask is: Just what kind of person is this habit or practice trying to produce, and to what end is such a practice aimed?”
“‘Secular’ liturgies are fundamentally formative…[they] capture our hearts by capturing our imaginations and drawing us into ritual practices that ‘teach’ us to love something very different from the kingdom of God.”
“We should be asking: What vision of human flourishing is implicit in this or that practice? What does the good life look like as embedded in cultural rituals? What sort of person will I become after being immersed in this or that cultural liturgy?”
“And so the university experience ends with a commissioning; not quite a ‘Great’ Commission, but something close. We are launched into career (and careerism) by the holistic formation we’ve received at college. The classroom and laboratory, lecture hall and library have played some role in this. But the information provided there has not been nearly as potent as the formation we’ve received in the dorm and frat house, or the stadium and the dance club.”
“Being human takes practice – and implicit in those practices is a social imaginary that orients, guides, and shapes our desire and action.”
“So, what if we sought to discern not the essence of Christianity as a system of beliefs (or summarized in a worldview) but instead sought to discern the shape of Christian faith as a form of life?”
“Worship is not some odd, extravagant, extra-human thing we do as an add-on to our earthly, physical, material nature; rather, ‘worship is the epiphany of the world.’ Worship is the ordering and reordering of our material being to the end for which it was meant.”
“We may have construed worship as a primarily didactic, cognitive affair and thus organized it around a message that fails to reach our embodied hearts, and thus fails to touch our desire. Or we may have construed worship as a refueling event – a chance primarily to get what I ‘need’ to make it through the week….we’ll notice that some key elements of the church’s liturgical tradition drop out…we lose precisely those worship practices that function as counter-formations to the liturgies of the mall, the stadium, and the frat house.”
“In a broken, fragmented world, the church is called to be the first-fruits of a new creation by embodying a reconciled community and the way we begin to learn that is at the communion table.”
“The reconciled and redeemed body of Christ is marked by cruciform practices that counter the liturgies of consumption, hoarding and greed that characterize so much of our late modern culture.”
“Christian worship as an affective school, a pedagogy of desire in which we learn not how to be spiritual or religious, but how to be human, how to take up the vocation given to us at creation. And now we are sent from this practice arena – which is the real world – into the world to be witnesses by being God’s image bearers, who cultivate the world in a way that exemplifies Jesus’ perfect ‘cultural’ labor. That now includes our cultural labor of being the church, the body of Christ, in a way that is hospitable and inviting – in a way that invites others to find their identity and vocation in Christ, to become ‘new creations’ and thus become the humans they were called to be….thus the church is a cultural center, not just a spiritual filling station or a hospital for the soul.”
“Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” -Pope Benedict XVI
“Christianity ‘is not beliefs about God plus behavior. We are Christians not because of what we believe but because we have been called to be disciples of Jesus. Becoming a disciple is not a matter of a new or changed self-understanding, but of becoming a part of a different community with a different set of practices.”‘ – Hauerwas