This is Your Brain on Apple…

ByJames K. A. Smith May 24, 2011

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 that the emotional experience associated with Apple stimulated the same regions of the brain that are stimulated by religious experience.

Always nice to have little reductionistic empiricism in the back pocket of my argument!

DTK Case Studies

The Mall as Consumerist Cathedral

ByJames K. A. Smith November 20, 2012

When I give talks based on Desiring the Kingdom, I often revisit my analysis of the mall as a consumerist cathedral. The concreteness and universality of the experience is usually a helpful entrée into the core concepts of my liturgical analysis of culture. A couple of resources to add to that analysis: When I was…

DTK Case Studies

Bruce Springsteen, Educator

ByJames K. A. Smith August 3, 2012

I was 15 years old when “Born in the U.S.A.” was released, and even those of us in Canada couldn’t evade its impact and allure. This was also the era of the emerging ubiquity of the music video, so Courtney Cox’s cameo in the “Dancing in the Dark” video is forever emblazoned on my memory….

DTK Case Studies

The Mall-ification of America

ByJames K. A. Smith October 10, 2011

A friend pointed me to this article on the “Mall-ification of America”–which dovetails with my analysis of the mall’s liturgies in Desiring the Kingdom, particularly highlighting the assimilation that happens when we naively adopt what we (wrongly) think are “neutral” forms. Consider these concluding paragraphs: There is some data to go on, though: According to…

DTK Case Studies

Google asks: “What do you love?”

ByJames K. A. Smith September 27, 2011

When I give talks based on Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes try to crystallize the philosophical anthropology at the heart of the book in this way: “If I really want to know who you are, I’m not going to ask what you know. I’m not even going to ask what you believe. If I really…

DTK Case Studies

The iPhone-ization of our World(view)

ByJames K. A. Smith September 2, 2011

Every technology is attended by a mode of bodily practice. So even if the computer is primarily an information processor, it can never completely reduce us to just “thinking things” because it requires some mode of bodily interface: whether we’re hunched over a desk, glued to a screen; or looking downward at a smartphone, our…

DTK Case Studies

The Medium is the Message

ByJames K. A. Smith August 9, 2011

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…

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