Christian worship is the feast where we acquire new hungers—for God and for what God desires—and are then sent into his creation to act accordingly. James Smith

Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. James Smith

The point of apocalyptic literature is not prediction but unmasking—unveiling the realities around us for what they really are. While the Roman Empire pretends to be a gift to civilisation and the zenith of human accomplishment, John’s apocalyptic perspective from a heavenly angle shows us the reality: Rome is a monster. James Smith

To be human is to be a liturgical animal, a creature whose loves are shaped by our worship. And worship isn’t optional. James Smith

We become what we worship because what we worship is what we love. As we’ve seen, it’s not a question of whether you worship but what you worship—which is why John Calvin refers to the human heart as an “idol factory.” James Smith

Education in virtue is a kind of formation, a retraining of our dispositions. “Learning” virtue—becoming virtuous—is more like practising scales on the piano than learning music theory: the goal is, in a sense, for your fingers to learn the scales so they can then play “naturally,” as it were. Learning here isn’t just information acquisition; it’s more like inscribing something into the very fibre of your being. James Smith

Our orienting loves are like a kind of gravity—carrying us in the direction to which they are weighted. If our loves are absorbed with material things, then our love is a weight that drags us downward to inferior things. But when our loves are animated by the renewing fire of the Spirit, then our weight tends upward. James Smith

The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our telos—our goal, our end. But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know or believe or think about; rather, our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave. James Smith

But Augustine also notes the alternative: since our hearts are made to find their end in God, we will experience a besetting anxiety and restlessness when we try to love substitutes. To be human is to have a heart. You can’t not love. James Smith