Review of Smith's "Desiring the Kingdom"

I've looked through (read the intro and conclusion and skimmed the rest) Smith's new book, the first in his three volume "Cultural Liturgies" about spiritual formation. With that brief of a survey, I may not have understood the nuances of all of Smith's ideas, but my short response is that I didn't really like it. Maybe I'm just too wedded to the Calvin "world and life view" approach that he's rejecting (or at least the straw man version of that view that he's rejecting), but I much preferred Crouch's "Culture Making" approach to Smith's "spiritual formation ueber alles" argument. I can certainly understand, however, why a number of people at JBU might be more sympathetic than I am, at the very least for the support he would offer to the "spiritual formation" discussion and the challenges he would make to much of what we're currently doing.

Smith notes on page 219 (in footnote 6) that people have resisted some of his ideas (that the university is a subset of the church, that it should function more like a monastery, and that it should replace worldview language with spiritual formation language) for four reasons: it makes the university an extension of Sunday school, it violates "sphere sovereignty" separations, "spiritual formation" language is often considered too "fuzzy" and too dominated by SD folk, and, most importantly, we in contemporary culture are too wedded to modern (and almost "evil") notions of liberal autonomy when we should be returning instead to previous ancient and medieval understandings of human nature. I am guilty as charged, especially on that last one. I do not want some spiritual formation "philosopher kings" requiring me to participate in their specially designed set of discipline-focused small group activities, which is pretty much what Smith proposes in the last chapter as being the only "Christian" education worth its salt. Blech! I am actually joining a small group at church based on the work of James B. Smith (of Friends) that will emphasize spiritual disciplines, but hey, that's my choice, not something imposed on me by the spiritual formation cognoscenti.

In short, while I find Smith's arguments interesting and sometimes in keeping with my Episcopal inclinations, and while I can see how conversations with him might be valuable for a lot of people at JBU, I personally have very little desire to have his ideas become the centerpiece of a lot of our strategic planning work the way that Crouch's book so helpfully is becoming such a centerpiece. If we took Smith seriously, for example, we probably could not use the word "excellent" in our list of values, we would probably have to include words like "spiritual formation," "worship," or "liturgy" in our list of values, we'd probably have to shift from calling ourselves "interdenominational" to "nondenominational" (you have to be connected to some specific church in order to do Christian education, right?), and we'd have to up-end much of our Core Curriculum as well as our approach to integration of faith and learning. I would personally oppose all of those moves.

In short, it's not my cup of tea. Then again, neither was Wolterstorff, whose "Until Justice and Peace Embrace" ideas seem to undergird some of this work.