James K. A. Smith

Summary: A “travelogue of the heart” exploring human longings and the heart’s true home.

James K. A. Smith encountered an interesting detour in his doctoral studies in philosophy. Setting out to study Heidegger, he found Heidegger and his contemporaries pointing him back to Saint Augustine and the discovery that the questions and the longings of our time are the very ones Augustine addressed in his time in Confessions, captured most succinctly in his statement “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

He draws on the restlessness of the characters in Kerouac’s On the Road that impelled their travels. He follows Augustine’s route, both in terms of places, and in the longings expressed in Confessions, recounting his own travels on Augustine’s “road trip.” Smith argues that this is an authentic word to our generation, addressing ten longings: freedom, ambition, sex, mothers, friendship, enlightenment, story, justice, fathers, and death. Finally he addresses the possibility of homecoming.

Smith contends that Augustine understood that we “practice our way into freedom” by joining in the practices of Christ’s body in worship and surrender. Augustine admitted that we will do most things with mixed motives but as we are rooted in God’s love ambition is fueled with a different fire. He addresses Augustine’s flawed understanding that only celibacy could remedy promiscuity and yet recognizes that there is a freedom in not being dominated by libido and that marriage may protect us from the excesses and abuses of sexuality while offering us longed-for covenantal relationship.

It seems as each of these longings are explored on Augustine’s journey, there is a kind of transformative turn that Smith observes in Augustine. Enlightenment comes not by scaling intellectual mountains but in humbling oneself. It is in brokenness that we become good fathers.

Many think, as in Kerouac, that “the road is life.” We’ve been told, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. But deep down we do long to arrive home. But, Smith writes:

“You can’t get there from here. But what if someone came to get you? You can’t get to that last thing, but what if it came to you? And what if that thing turned out to be a someone? And what if that someone not only knows where the end of the road is but promises to accompany you the rest of the way, to never leave you or forsake you until you arrive?”

Smith reminds us that God has come to get each of us through the cross of Jesus who has bridged our unbridgeable void.

Reading Smith makes me want to pull out Confessions again. He reminds me that for all our differences across history, we have restless hearts and deep longings in common, and we are “on the road” because we long for home.… (more)

After reading the first chapter I returned my library book and bought a copy because I knew that it was a book I was going to want to take my time reading. I finished this relatively short book in a little under four months, and I loved it. I know "How to Inhabit Time" is a book that I will want to read again.

Christianity, philosophy, and art come together in this thoughtful book about how we live in time: how the past informs our present, living in seasons of hardship, how to look forward to what’s to come in a healthy way, etc. Smith manages to write something personal while also tackling the scope of history and society. Check this book out if you’re looking for a book with complex and nuanced ideas to chew on.… (more)

I had been meaning for some time to start the most important work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, published in 2007 and considered to be one of the most profound and stimulating analyzes of Western modernity. But the more than 800 pages put me off and they still do. That's why I decided to read this introduction of about 120 pages, it seemed like a manageable chunk. Well, that still was an underestimation, because Taylor's very philosophical reasoning makes this introduction no easy feat.
I was quite impressed by the historical panorama that Taylor sketches of how we have ended up in our secular age, mainly through a combination of the unintended effects of the Reformation, the penchant for the precise observation of nature (naturalism), and the tendency towards nominalism, which dates from the Middle Ages, i.e. the realization that words do not coincide with things. For me as a historian, Taylor uses a very rough brush, but the fact that he continually emphasizes the contingency of the process - in Smith's words a “zigzag account of causal complexity” - made quite an impression. I'll definitely go back to that later.
I must admit that the subsequent description of exactly where we are in the secular era and how we (can) deal with the demons of that era was much more difficult. Taylor does not shy away from detours in his reasoning and regularly introduces new concepts and horizons of insight. It now seems to me that his principal goal was to critique the simplistic contemporary view that the secular, that is to say the exclusive humanistic, view is the only possible realistic view of things, and I can agree with that. Smith emphasizes that Taylor cannot (and does not hide) his Catholic background in his analyzes of possible ways to deal with the ghosts of the secular age, and also that was very recognizable. But I felt that Smith's introduction in this second part remained a little more on the surface, and therefore lacked convincing power. I guess I will have to start that “A Secular Age” myself at some point, but it won't be right away.… (more)