“We who are Christians and propose to be philosophers,” he wrote, “must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers. We must therefore pursue our projects with integrity, independence, and Christian boldness.”15

“This isn’t you,” they tell us. “And you know it. So do we.”

It’s also why we need to beware of monsters: our creational impulse can turn into Promethean striving. Our cultural creations can outstrip us, even at times when the culture-making impulse is suffused with the best of intentions. And so we need to appreciate that culture is not neutral or benign—it is not simply a “good.” More importantly, we need

the Reformers saw the liturgy as God’s action and our faithful reception of that action. The governing idea of the Reformed liturgy is thus twofold: the conviction that to participate in the liturgy is to enter the sphere of God’s acting, not just of God’s presence, plus the conviction that we are to appropriate God’s action in faith and gratitude

We are to intentionally “clothe ourselves” with love. So the love that attracts us to God is something that grows through practice and repetition, and if we want to pursue God in our vocations, we need to immerse ourselves in rituals and rhythms and practices whereby the love of God seeps into our very character and is woven into not just how we

Jacobs cites Eamon Duffy’s grudging admission of the impact of the Book of Common Prayer: “Cranmer’s sombrely magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments.”

For a tangible expression of this, see Destin Sandlin’s remarkable video, “The Backwards Brain Bicycle.”a Sandlin creates a bicycle with an important hitch: when you turn the handlebars left, the front wheel turns right—and vice versa. Having ridden a bike his entire life, Sandlin literally cannot ride this bike. His neural pathways and bodily

And yet we often approach discipleship as primarily a didactic endeavor—as if becoming a disciple of Jesus is largely an intellectual project, a matter of acquiring knowledge. Why is that? Because every approach to discipleship and Christian formation assumes an implicit model of what human beings are. While these assumptions usually remain

The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’ It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God.”