In Desiring the Kingdom (and on a more popular level, You Are What You Love), James K. A. Smith lays out an anthropological vision. We humans are desiring animals, not thinking machines. If we were thinking machines, we could transform ourselves by thinking correctly. Unfortunately that just isn’t the case. Rather, it’s the liturgies that we attend to (whether ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’) that aim our desires toward a certain end. In Imagining the Kingdom, the second volume in the Cultural Liturgies trilogy, Smith leverages the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and social theorist Pierre Bourdieu to explain how worship works for desiring animals.

We have all experienced the difference between acting instinctually and acting thoughtfully. Merleau-Ponty argues that there is a realm in human action between thinking and instinct. This realm is more than cognitive, it is a way of perception rooted in our bones—it is kinesthetic. The key to forming our actions is through the development of habits which form this in-between realm.

[H]abit “is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action” (PP 166 [PP refers to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception]). This insight is crucial. Once again Merleau-Ponty is prompting us to recognize the between, this middle space of our being-in-the-world—between instinct and intellect, between reflex and reflexivity. So habit is not “knowledge” in the usual sense; but neither is it the reaction of some unthinking, passive piece of meat. (58)

So the question is, how do we train that space between instinct and intellect?

The French existentialist philosophers were concerned with the question of human freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular, argued that existence precedes essence. That is, the individual is radically free at any moment to make any possible choice. On the other side of the argument, you have people who claim that people are just the sum of their experiences—that freedom is an illusion. Bourdieu brings clarity to this argument with his concept of habitus. While it’s a difficult word to precisely define, habitus generally refers to the structuring elements of our world which ground us but which also allow us to practice regulated improvisations. We are free, but our freedom is grounded and contextualized in the world around us.

Here we get to the second half of Imagining the Kingdom. Christian formation involves the practice of liturgies—kinesthetic and poetic—which form the communal habitus of the church and aim the desire of Christians toward the Kingdom of God.

Smith’s book is (obviously) much richer than this summary. It deserves a careful reading by Christian educators and pastors who are not afraid of stretching their minds. In the end, Smith’s vision of Christian formation is more faithful to our contingent creatureliness than Cartesian anthropology (see Who’s Afraid of Relativism) and provides a fruitful context from which to re-imagine and re-story our worship.

Smith, James K. A. Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Baker Academic, 2013. Cultural Liturgies 2.