Jamie Smith’s latest book ( Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies) ) is excellent.  He rightly challenges the tendency for “worldview-talk” to take a rationalist bent, and in place of the assumption that “man is a thinking being” he argues an anthropology based on the notion of man as a desiring, loving being.  We are what we love, and the desires of our hearts are formed in us as habits formed through “thick rituals” that Smith calls “liturgies.”

He neatly sketches out an anthropology of homo liturgicus .

To say man is essentially a desiring being is to say that we are involved with the world before we begin to think about it.  Following Heidegger, he suggests that ” care is the most primordial way we intend the world.”  To say man is essentially desiring also means that we are moved and motivated teleologically, by some “eschatological” picture of the good life.  Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of “social imaginaries,” Smith argues that this orientation is fixed in our imagination by “icons” of the good life - paintings, films, novels - and through these “pictures” the vision  a good life “becomes “an integral part of our dispositions .”  (Smith illustrates throughout the book with digressions on novels, films, and other arts.)  Bodily training shapes our hearts, and this bodily training comes through participation in rituals of ultimate concern, religious rituals that are liturgies, whether sacred or secular.

Armed with this anthropology, Smith is able to analyze the ways we are culturally formed more subtly than he could in a framework of “worldview.”  He examines the experience of a shopping mall, and suggests that the ritual of mall-shopping embodies a gospel and trains us to desire the good life that this gospel promises.  Advertisements depict an ideal life, surrounded by goods, and implicitly convict us of our brokenness and failure.  Shopping is a social event, and together we and our shopping partners hope to achieve the good life that we see in the ads by buying stuff.  Yet, given the dynamics of consumer culture, this redemption is never achieved; we soon tire of the goods we consume, and ads train us in discontent, encouraging us to think that, while the last item failed to bring satisfaction, surely this new one will.  Smith also applies this mode of analysis, in challenging ways, to the rituals of American nationalism.  With every cultural institution and trend, he urges us to ask “What telos does it ‘glorify’” and “what are the rituals and practices that constitute the secular liturgy” of the institution?

One of his examples is the modern university, and the book as a whole aims at a reformation of education along the lines of an anthropology of homo liturgicus .  As he writes early in the book, “education is not primarily a heady project concerned with providing information ; rather, education is most fundamentally a matter of formation , a task of shaping and creating a certain kind of people.  What makes them a distinctive kind of people is what they love or desire - what they envision as ‘the good life’ of the ideal picture of human flourishing.  An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices.  And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out ‘skilled workers’) that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption.  Behind the veneer of a ‘value-free’ education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative.  There is no neutral, nonformative education; in short, there is no such thing as a ‘secular’ education.”

The second part of Smith’s book sketches out an alternative Christian pedagogy of desire by focusing on the liturgical practices of the Christian church.  Worship, he argues, is more fundamental than worldview, and shapes worldview by shaping the heart’s desires, and he takes a stroll through the liturgy to show how worship forms a counter-pedagogy to the liturgical formation of the world.

I disagree with some of Smith’s positions and conclusions, but by and large he gets things exactly right.  His is the first book in a series entitled “Cultural Liturgies,” and if the rest of the books are as well-written, clear, and thoughtful as this, it looks to be an extremely useful series.