Book Review: Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works

Abstract

Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. By James K. A. Smith. Cultural Liturgies, volume 2. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2013. 224 pp. $22.99 (paper).Plenty of modem theologians have exposed the problems involved in privileging the human mind and rational thought over the body and experience. Few, however, have developed constmctive holistic accounts of how human beings live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) as embodied creatures. James K. A. Smith addresses this need by exploring the dynamics of human formation and action in Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. This second volume of Smith's Cultural Liturgies series revolves around a deceptively simple conviction: human beings are animals (p. 3) whose lives are formed and transformed by stories (p. 14). Yet the complexity of Smiths thought comes to fife through his interdisciplinary engagement with French phenomenology and social theory, classic literature, and American popular culture. Although Smith's insights could gain greater force through further contextualization, Imagining the Kingdom offers a provocative contribution to theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and liturgical studies.Part I of the book sets out to assemble a theoretical toolbox (p. 29) for correcting intellectualist theological perspectives that mistakenly assume that right knowledge produces right action (p. 33). According to Smith, human experience regularly demonstrates the inadequacy of this view; human formation-whether Christian or secular-is not such a straightforward or even conscious process. In search of a fuller account, Smith turns to Maurice Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology of perception in chapter 1 and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice in chapter 2, and he navigates both streams of thought with ease. Readers who have previously encountered these challenging thinkers will appreciate Smith's accessible descriptions of their key concepts. With the help of Merleau-Ponty, Smith elaborates the texture of human subjectivity, in which embodiment, perception, place, desire, and all come together to shape ones participation in a given situation. Smith then takes up Bourdieu's understanding of social habituation and practice to articulate how human perception and action are indelibly formed over time.With these tools in hand, Smith delineates the formative power of (p. 137) in Part II. In chapter 3, he draws upon Mark Johnson s discussion of the relationship between the body and metaphor in order to show how embodied experience weaves together imagination, metaphor, and narrative (p. 124). This poetics provides a basis for Smiths argument in this chapter: liturgies work on us because they consist of stories. …