Josh Mann

“So it is precisely our allergy to repetition in worship that has undercut the counterformative power of Christian worship—because all kinds of secular liturgies shamelessly affirm the good of repetition.”
― James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): How Worship Works

“Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“The doubter’s doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly...This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual.”
― James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church