You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith: Book Review By Michael Ferber

James K. A. Smith.  You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. 2016. Brazos Press.

Reviewed By Michael P. Ferber, PhD. Associate Professor of Geography at The King’s University in Edmonton; Previously VP Student Life and Dean of Students.

James K.A. Smith has written a useful digest for Christian Canadian student development professionals to consider spirituality, discipleship, worship and service. The premise of his approachable and easy to read volume is that we worship what we love, but we might not love what we think or even intend. For a long time, Christians have approached discipleship as primarily a didactic endeavor rooted in the intellectual project of acquiring knowledge. But Smith argues that our reliance on intellect has hoodwinked us into seeing ourselves primarily as thinking beings. He provides an alternative paradigm a la Augustine that reorients discipleship in terms of the relationship to the one whom we love because He first loved us. This requires a change in our primary orientating organ from the head to the heart. Our loves operate without us thinking about them, and this is a cause for concern. Love is a habit, and discipleship is a habituation of our loves. If our heart is like a compass, then we need to recalibrate it to ensure our own pedagogies of desire – the things we habitually worship – are not actually idols. If we are what we love then we are what we worship, and the liturgies of our regular habits can reveal our deepest desires. We cannot think ourselves into right worship because the process of habituation is unconscious and covert - our primary orientation is visceral, not cerebral. 

Smith brings the reader through a number of cultural liturgies in an attempt to expose potential idols that may be driving our own habituations. He unmasks our cultural worship of shopping and consumption, critiques contemporary worship paradigms that turn Jesus into a commodity, and questions current paradigms of youth ministry that are always looking for the next big thing. Throughout the book he consistently asks us to consider the telos (goal) of our personal and corporate practices to reorient them from cultural liturgies to the Shalom of God. What is the chief end of man? To acquire stuff with the illusion that we can enjoy it forever? Many students who arrive at our Christian Universities and Bible Colleges are more concerned with finding a major that will result in the highest lifetime paychecks than they are in unmasking the idols in their hearts. What is the telos of Christian higher education? For Smith it is much more than preparing students to get a good job and make some coin. Rather, it is offering formative framing practices. “Contextualizing Christian education in the ultimate context of a kingdom-telos invites an array of practices in areas from admissions through orientation and even commencement and alumni relations – practices that rehearse the story of God’s renewal of all things not just informationally, but formationally.” (168)

Smith argues that every pastor (and in his broad definition would include Deans of Students, Residence Coordinators, etc.) is a curator, responsible for the care of souls and responsible to curate hearts. Smith’s concern is that rather than finding the incarnation, many young adults experience what Taylor has described as excarnation – “disembodying the Christian faith, turning it into a ‘heady’ affair that could be boiled down to a message and grasped with the mind.” (101) Instead, Smith calls us to consider how true worship restores our loves and re-stories our imaginations to draw us into the Biblical plotlines of gathering, listening, communing and sending. As a university Professor Smith has helped many college students find their way back to God through the ancient practices of the Christian Church after a period of disenchantment. He encourages us to reframe from thinking about the ideas we want students to be informed with to thinking about the lived community of practice that is the university. Smith is an academic, which is too bad because he would have made for an incredible VP Student Life!

Throughout the book many themes will resonate with Canadian student development professionals. First and foremost, Smith takes on the dualism between curricular and co-curricular functions of the university and clearly demonstrates that lived habituations facilitated by student life teams are as or even more important for the development of a discipled Christian student then ideas learned in the classroom. This volume may be worth sharing with your faculty colleagues! Because Smith is a Canadian, he includes many illustrations from the Great White North including his upbringing in Ontario and a number of successful examples such as the Prairie Centre for Education’s “Teaching for Transformation” program hosted in Edmonton at The King’s University. Ultimately Smith reminds us that the tedious aspects of our work with students is like that of stone masons. Ask one what they are doing, and they might say, “I am cutting this stone into a perfectly square shape.” Ask another and they will respond, “I am building a cathedral.” As Canadian student development professionals our telos is building cathedrals, and our daily habits and practices are the building blocks preparing the next generation of Christians to live out their faith. We are, indeed, what we love.