Desiring the Kingdom
Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
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Narrated by:
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John Pruden
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By:
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James K.A. Smith
About this listen
Malls, stadiums, and universities are actually liturgical structures that influence and shape our thoughts and affections. Humans - as Augustine noted - are "desiring agents", full of longings and passions; in brief, we are what we love.
James K. A. Smith focuses on the themes of liturgy and desire in Desiring the Kingdom, the first book in a three-volume set on the theology of culture. He redirects our yearnings to focus on the greatest good: God. Ultimately, Smith seeks to re-envision education through the process and practice of worship. Students of philosophy, theology, worldview, and culture will welcome Desiring the Kingdom, as will those involved in ministry.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2009 James K. A. Smith (P)2018 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Spirit and Sacrament by pastor and author Andrew Wilson is an impassioned call to join together two traditions that are frequently and unnecessarily kept separate. It is an invitation to pursue the best of both worlds in worship, the Eucharistic and the charismatic, with the grace of God at the center. Wilson envisions church services in which healing testimonies, creeds, exuberant praise, and ancient liturgy coexist, and in doing so, deepen our worship and increase our joy.
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Is not what I was hoping
- By KIM SMITH on 01-16-23
By: Andrew Wilson
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The Way to Heaven
- The Gospel According to John Wesley
- By: Steve Harper
- Narrated by: Maurice England
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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The heart of this book is a thoughtful and inspiring look at Wesley's theology of grace and its power to transform. Included are two new chapters. 'Vision and Means' explores Wesley's mission and methods, and 'To Serve the Present Age' considers the impact and relevance of his message today. In addition, an updated reading list facilitates further study, and questions at the end of each chapter stimulate personal reflection and small group discussion.Ideal as a textbook or for personal study and reflection, this book will advance your knowledge and piety as you travel 'the way to heaven.
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Very helpful
- By jride on 11-18-16
By: Steve Harper
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The Great Spiritual Migration
- How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian
- By: Brian McLaren
- Narrated by: Brian McLaren
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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With his trademark brilliance, generosity of spirit, and clear pastoral calling, Brian McLaren synthesizes an accessible and inviting understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.
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A must-read for Christian thinkers
- By Amazon Customer on 10-26-16
By: Brian McLaren
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A New Kind of Christianity
- Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
- By: Brian D. McLaren
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the church. Not since the Reformation five centuries ago have so many Christians come together to ask whether the church is in sync with their deepest beliefs and commitments. These believers range from evangelicals to mainline Protestants to Catholics, and the person who best represents them is author and pastor Brian McLaren. In this much anticipated book, McLaren examines ten questions facing today's church - questions about how to articulate the faith itself, the nature of its authority, who God is....
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Clear, Careful, Considerate Confrontation
- By Celia on 09-10-12
By: Brian D. McLaren
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Scripture and the Authority of God
- How to Read the Bible Today
- By: N. T. Wright
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In this revised and expanded edition of The Last Word, Wright, Bishop of Durham, one of the preeminent Bible scholars of our day and author of such beloved works as After You Believe and Simply Christian, gives new life to the old, tattered doctrine of the authority of Scripture, delivering a fresh, helpful, and concise statement on the current battles for the Bible and restoring Scripture as a place to find God's voice.
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Takes scripture very seriously
- By Adam Shields on 05-31-11
By: N. T. Wright
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Dangerous Mystic
- Meister Eckhart's Path to the God Within
- By: Joel F. Harrington
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic whose wisdom powerfully appeals to seekers seven centuries after his death. In the modern era, Eckhart's writings have struck a chord with thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merton, Sartre, John Paul II, and the current Dalai Lama. He is the inspiration for the best-selling New Age author Eckhart Tolle's pen name, and his 14th-century quotes have become an online sensation. Today, a variety of Christians, as well as many Zen Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, Jewish Cabbalists, and various spiritual seekers, all claim Eckhart as their own.
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Meister Ekhart foisting his sexuality....
- By Kindle Customer on 08-08-19
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Things Hidden
- Scripture as Spirituality
- By: Richard Rohr O.F.M.
- Narrated by: John Quigley O.F.M.
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
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The Bible is meant to be about transformation, not merely information. In Things Hidden, Richard Rohr invites you to experience Scripture as spirituality - as a living text that can breathe new life into your relationship with God and change your way of seeing the world.
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excellent and inspirational in the insights
- By Nana on 11-03-22
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The Spirit of the Disciplines
- Understanding How God Changes Lives
- By: Dallas Willard
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Dallas Willard, one of today's most brilliant Christian thinkers and the author of The Divine Conspiracy ( Christianity Today's 1999 Book of the Year), presents a way of living that enables ordinary men and women to enjoy the fruit of the Christian life.
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Drivel
- By Amazon Customer on 07-09-18
By: Dallas Willard
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I Am a Follower
- The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus
- By: Leonard Sweet
- Narrated by: Leonard Sweet
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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“Leadership” has become a runaway obsession for those who are called to equip the body of Christ for service in the Kingdom of God. The concept of “followership” is all but lost in the wake of this leadership fetish, a near hypnotic obsession. Jesus’ clear call, and the pattern of New Testament leadership, are actually found in a pattern of followership. We’ve been told otherwise but when it comes to a movement in our churches, our families, or the workplace, everything rises or falls on followership. Sweet proposes an intentional shift from leadership cults to followership cultures.
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A manual for those on the Journey
- By R. L. Richter on 05-04-12
By: Leonard Sweet
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On Augustine
- By: Rowan Williams
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury and his return to academic life (Master of Magdalene College Cambridge), Rowan Williams has demonstrated a massive new surge of intellectual energy. In this new audiobook, he turns his attention to St Augustine. St Augustine not only shaped the development of Western theology, he also made a major contribution to political theory ( The City of God) and, through his Confessions, to the understanding of human psychology.
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thoughtful take.
- By Michael McGuire on 04-17-22
By: Rowan Williams
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The Thrill of Orthodoxy
- Rediscovering the Adventure of Christian Faith
- By: Trevin Wax
- Narrated by: Trevin Wax
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Every generation faces the temptation to wander from orthodoxy—to seek out the jolt that comes with false teaching, and to drift with cultural currents. And so every generation must be awakened again to the thrill of orthodoxy, and experience the astonishment that comes from stumbling afresh upon the electrifying paradoxes at the heart of the Christian faith. In The Thrill of Orthodoxy, Trevin Wax turns the tables on those who believe Christian teaching is narrow and outdated.
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Misleading Title - Not actually Orthodox
- By John Aschenbrenner on 09-17-23
By: Trevin Wax
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Amazing
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Accessible Charles Taylor!
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What listeners say about Desiring the Kingdom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dr. David Odegard
- 06-20-19
F ormational
I like about 89% of what Smith writes. Whenever he strays into epistemology, he quickly swims into postmodernism, but he avoids those treacherous waters in this delightful book. He explores what the Telos of learning and formation should be for fully developed Christians and he nails it.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-28-24
Fantastic stuff...harder to digest.
Honestly, this book and the concepts in it are worth the read. For whatever reason though, I felt as if it was hard to make some of the thoughts tangible, and even a little harder to get through all of it.
That being said, if you are looking for a book that involves a discussion on the Kingdom of God, this should probably be one you read.
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- Kevin
- 08-06-18
A paradigm-shifting view of Christian education
Smith does a masterful job of demonstrating that people more often act out of their loves and desires than out of their beliefs and knowledge. The key to transformation in the Christian life is not merely more information or an accurate worldview but rightly formed desires. For a lighter take on the same material, listen to Smith's You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit.
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- Adam Shields
- 02-13-18
Wish it was Smith reading this. But still good.
I am quite late to actually reading Desiring the Kingdom. It was first published 9 years ago. I purchased it 4 years ago, but I didn’t actually read Desiring the Kingdom until this week when I realized that there was a new audiobook out.
The basic ideas in Desiring the Kingdom are not new to me. I have read six of Smith’s other books including You Are What You Love twice. (You Are What You Love is intended to be a more popular level introduction to similar ideas.) Several of the illustrations, going to the mall and ball park as an alien anthropologist trying to understand what it is that we as humans are doing is familiar from other books and talks I have heard. But it is worth reading this full book as both a reminder of the ideas and a more full expression.
Desiring the Kingdom is attempting to refocus our Christian discipleship away from information sharing toward worship in a broad sense. We are not simply ‘Brains on a stick’ but we are ‘thinking things’. It is not that information and thinking are unimportant, they are very important. But we are not changed simply by being introduced to information. We are changed through the power of worship and by refocusing on what we love.
Part of what is difficult for me is that I am a part of a megachurch, which I love, but which does not really take the ideas of Smith’s understanding of worship into account. My church wants to be a church that unchurched people like attending. And I love that. Our church is full of people that hated church as children, teens, or adults and because they hated church they never understood the gospel (or in some cases the actual gospel wasn’t presented.)
But I also think my church misses the some of the spiritual power available to them because of the way worship is structured. We sing, and we sing good music, but it tends to be a bit loud and bit too focused on the band and not focused enough on the participation. But as a society we don’t sing together often and many visitors don’t know the songs, so I understand. We take up an offering that almost no one actually puts anything in. Because most people that give, give online automatically and we say that we only want people that claim this as their church home to give. We have a message that takes seriously the gospel as a means to transform our lives and seeks to take seriously the scripture, but we don’t read the bible corporately except as an illustration.
We do center our worship around baptism. And most services do have a baptism as the central and focal point of the service. But we do not ever have communion (eucharist) as part of our Sunday worship. That is a theological decision that biases concern about taking communion unworthily over the power of the eucharist to draw us both to Christ and to the body of believers around us.
We also do not ever have general confession and absolution. This is true of most non-denominational and baptist churches. I have never been a part of a church that did general confession and absolution. But I think this is theologically wrong. We as a group of believers can do few things that I think are more evangelistically oriented than publicly repent and be forgiven.
Desiring the Kingdom is not mostly about the local church, it is more about discipleship and education. But an understanding of what happens in the liturgy, ideally, matters to how Smith conceives of discipleship and education. My church and most Protestant churches are mostly oriented around the sermon and therefore oriented around information sharing. The catholic/orthodox focus on the eucharist as the center point of worship helps to draw our awareness to the fact that it is not the information that saves us, but the Christ. It is not that we don’t need to know about Christ and theology and scripture and our ethical requirements for living, but those things are dependent upon our relationship to, and our dependence upon, Christ.
What Smith is doing in Desiring the Kingdom is pointing out that our practices matter to how we think. It is not the other way around. We do not mostly change practice because we have new information. If we did then no doctor would smoke and no banker would declare bankruptcy. It is the practices that allow us to shape the processing of the information.
I think that most people outside the church expect the church to be at least a little weird. When you do polling about what type of buildings non-Christians prefer, they tend to choose explicitly religious architecture. When people actually are willing to come to a worship service, I think they expect it to be a bit weird. So we should explain our weirdness, but we should actually have some weirdness that has real spiritual meaning. Every service should have confession and absolution and eucharist as central. The message is still there and important, but it is rooted in the spiritual power of the two previous corporate activities of the people and not the skill of the preacher.
Communal practices are difficult in a pluralistic world. Many Christians have begun thinking again about withdrawal from culture for the purposes of discipleship (think Dreher’s Benedict Option.) Smith thinks we need to make clear choices that makes us different from the world around us, but not choices that remove us from culture. College students that may focus their learning of social theory by being required to serve their community. Or very locally focused church that intentionally does not remove their students from a local low income, poor performing school, but intentionally makes that local school part of their lives so that the people there are known as individuals.
Christianity is not about what we get or about what is normal, but is about Christ being King, and Christ’s kingdom. That means we will always be somewhat at odds with culture and the political world around us. But the orientation of Christ in his incarnation is willingly sacrificing his own comfort and earned place to be with us.
One last note, I think that while Smith is not explicitly talking about the splits between racial groups within Christianity (or outside of Christianity) the reality of those divides not being solved by simple information or simple law changes is a strong support to Smith’s basic thesis that communal and individual practice and relationship matters more than information.
As I said above, I listened to this on audiobook. The narration was fine, but I really do think that publishers would do better if they allowed their authors to read. No one knows a book better than the author. The author is unlikely to mispronounce words or names (and there was at least one here). Jamie Smith said on twitter that he would have read if he had been allowed to. And this would have been a better audiobook if he had been allowed to read it himself.
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- David Calfee
- 01-29-19
awareness of how culture shapes people
great food for thought on how culture shapes us even without our conscious awareness of it.
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- G Man
- 04-13-23
Terrible
Could be thought provoking, but is poorly written and edited, and is mostly just WRONG or out of touch with its presentation of "facts". Also, this is the only Christian book that I've read that doesn't cite scripture.
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- Patrick Keele
- 04-03-23
Simply Unhelpful
This book has been the least helpful and least interesting read I have undertaken in my walk as a christian and seminarian. The author does a great job of leading the reader to see how desire is shaped by worldviews competing alongside the Christian worldview. Little direction is given toward providing a realistic, sizable difference in the problems which the author asserts. Critical and alarmist in nature with double standards of how worldviews were treated. The reader of the audiobook did a fine job.
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- Benjamin D. O'Toole
- 07-10-23
Smith’s False Dichotomy Sank His Good Ideas
The precognitive formation of a Christin social imaginary is well presented. The problem is that Smith makes a false dichotomy between the mind/learning and the habits/rituals which for it.
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- Donald
- 03-24-18
Some good premises, but poor conclusions.
Smith seems to see modern America's expression of capitalism to be so at odds with a proper understanding of the Biblical Kingdom that Christians must radically divorce themselves from it. I don't necessarily disagree, but because he doesn't go deep enough in his treatment of the subject, it is unclear whether he believes capitalism on the whole is antithetical to Gospel living (if so, that is where we part ways), or only the specific excesses of modern society in the West. Further, many of the problems in Christian education, worship and practice that Smith identifies are real enough, but his solutions (sparse as they are) seem untenable. I'm not sure if I'll continue the series, but there's enough baby in the bathwater here that I don't regret reading this book. Certainly, his basic argument that humans are primarily desiring or worshipping beings that are every day formed by the patterns of cultural liturgies, and so must undergo counterformation by means of Biblical, Kingdom desiring liturgy, is worth thinking about long and hard. Where that leads me, it seems, is pretty far off from where it has taken Smith.
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