In giving talks around the country about Desiring the Kingdom, one of the themes I regularly press is the refusal of any form/content distinction when it comes to Christian worship. This is central to my argument: when I claim that Christian worship forms and orients our loves, it’s not just any old version of Christian…
Josef Bengston passed along this interesting little snippet from Alain de Botton, an old favorite of mine. This is lifted from a TED talk in which he looks to religious sources for secular practices (kind of, in a backhanded way, confirming some of the analyses in Desiring the Kingdom): A sermon wants to change your…
In Desiring the Kingdom I offer an opening phenomenology of the mall as a temple–a religious, liturgical space whose labyrinthine corridors are lined by tiny chapels devoted to various saints. And those saints, I suggest, are “pictured” not in the flat renditions of stained-glass but in the 3-D icons of mannequins draped in the au…
Friends and readers now regularly float me tidbits that sort of serve as confirmations and illustrations–or at least case studies–of some of the kinds of claims I made in Desiring the Kingdom regarding cultural formation (like the recent study on the cult-status of Apple for devotees). So I’m going to crowd-source here and feature them…
Given the argument I make about the mall as temple in Desiring the Kingdom, several friends pointed out a recent study which purports to confirm the religious nature of “super brands,” lending some MRI support for what The Persuaders showed us already several years ago. Scanning the brain activity of Apple devotees, the researchers found…
David Orr’s essay on the instrumentalization of poetry in Oprah’s magazine is worth a read for all kinds of reasons, but especially for the concluding paragraph where he rightly laments: I wish, though, that they had found space for someone — not a critic, necessarily, just someone willing to be honest — to talk about…