Author: James K. A. Smith

Details have been confirmed for my New College Lectures at the University of New South Wales, May 23-26, 2012. And my romantic medievalism (with debts to Ruskin and Rossetti) just loves this poster.

Over at The Twelve blog, I’ve just put up a post that critically engages N.T. Wright’s argument in How God Became King. In some ways, it’s a response not only to his published argument but also some face-to-face encounters we’ve had over the past few months. It’s not comprehensive, but perhaps registers a point of…

Lionel Trilling classic work of criticism, The Liberal Imagination, has been a companion for me over the past several months (and makes a brief cameo appearance in Imagining the Kingdom). It’s difficult for us to read now, over fifty years later, because almost everything has changed, including our perception of “liberal”–and so we almost inevitably…

Diane Ravitch’s recent two-part essay on education in the New York Review of Books is a must-read, beginning with “Schools We Can Envy” (on the model of Finnish education) and culminating in “How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools.” While Ravitch can be polarizing, the quarry of her concerns–the dismal state of public education…

I just got my copy of The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, edited by Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (published by NYU Press). This is the fruit of a conference at Yale University several years ago. My paper, now chapter 7, is entitled “Secular Liturgies and the Prospects…

Some of you might follow @jameskasmith on Twitter. I should point out that, in a sense, that’s not me. That account was set up several years ago by someone else who merely used it as a feed for my blogs. And since he can no longer remember the account details, I’m unable to use that…