You Are What You Love is based on a fundamental anthropological insight: Decartes was wrong.

The Cartesian legacy has led us to believe that human beings are essentially machines who think. When I was younger I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. Kurzweil spoke of the approaching singularity when computers would exceed the human mind in complexity. If humans are essentially thinking machines, then what will happen when artificial intelligence exceeds human thought?

But we are not thinking machines. If we were, the solution to all of humanity’s problems would be reprogramming! If we’re honest with ourselves, we often echo the sentiment of St. Paul. “I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway” (Romans 7:18–29 NLT). The problem (often) is not that we don’t know the right things, but that we don’t do them. This is because, anthropologically speaking, we’re not fundamentally thinking machines—we are animals who love.

In You Are What You Love, James K. A. Smith simplifies the ideas he explored in Desiring the Kingdom. Our liturgies (including everything from attending worship on Sunday to taking in a football game) form our habits which aim our love (our desires) toward a certain end. Historic Christian practices form habits which aim our desires towards the Kingdom of God. The myriad secular liturgies we all participate in redirect our loves. Perhaps going to the mall is not as benign an activity as we thought.

Smith’s work has massive implications for the Christian life. By dethroning the “thinking machine” paradigm, Smith has opened up generative new ways to explore spiritual formation.

Smith, James K. A. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Brazos P, 2016.