Amanda McClendon

“Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts. Form”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“Subtraction stories Accounts that explain “the secular” as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“In fact, I must tell you that in the past couple years I’ve become convinced that perhaps nothing is so important for our walk with the Lord as good friends. I think God gives us good friends as sacraments – means of grace given to us as indices of God’s presence and conduits for our sanctification.”
― James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition

“In strange, often unintended ways, the pursuit of “justice,” shalom, and a “holistic” gospel can have its own secularizing effect. What begins as a gospel-motivated concern for justice can turn into a naturalized fixation on justice in which God never appears. And when that happens, “justice” becomes something else altogether—an idol, a way to effectively naturalize the gospel, flattening it to a social amelioration project in which the particularity of the revelation of God becomes strangely absent. Given the newfound appreciation for justice and shalom among evangelicals, we do well to see such trajectories as a cautionary tale, like a visitation from the ghost of Christmas future showing us where we could end up.”
― James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology