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I had heard that Smith was at his best in Chapter Five, and no doubt it is true. So far, I really like this chapter. His “alien approach” to the mall, I didn’t really connect with, because I’m not a big shopper, and I’ve been to the mall very infrequently — I can probably count my trips in the last five years on one hand.
But this? This I could get into. I do church. Weekly, even.
He he.
So today I thought I’d share some of my favorite quotes from the chapter. I hope you like them as much as I do!
[A]s the commercialization of Christmas has the “season” of consumption creeping from Thanksgiving all the way back to Halloween, the Christian observation of Advent marks a different orientation to time… {p. 156}
The temporality of Christian worship — macrocosmically expressed in the Christian year, microcosmically expressed in particular elements each Sunday — trains our imagination to be eschatological, looking forward not to the end of the world but to “the end of the world as we know it.” {p. 158}
We might describe this as the CNN-ization of time: a frenetic pursuit of “breaking news” that merely fixates on what has just happened before others have got the scoop. {p. 159}
We are a stretched people, citizens of a kingdom that is both older and newer than anything offered by “then contemporary.” {p. 159}
This last one reminded me of the concept of the humanities — the idea that the when we study the humanities rightly, we are being made more human.
It is a call to be{come} human, to take up the vocation of being fully and authentically human, and to be a community and people who image God to the world. {p. 163}
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