How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

by James K. A. Smith

Publisher:

Brazos

, 2022

Overview

Many Christians are disconnected from the past or imagine they are "above" history, immune to it, as if self-starters from clean slates in every generation. They suffer from a lack of awareness of time and the effects of history--both personal and collective--and thus are naive about current issues and fixated on the end times.

Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that awakening to the spiritual significance of time is crucial for orienting faith in the 21st century. He encourages us to cultivate the spiritual discipline of memento tempori, a temporal awareness of the Spirit's presence--indebted to a past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present. To gain spiritual appreciation for our mortality. To synchronize our heart-clocks with the tempo of the Spirit, which changes in the different seasons of life. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, Smith provides insights for pastoring, counseling, spiritual formation, politics, and public life.

Key Features

• Encourages to cultivate the spiritual discipline of memento tempori
• Provides insights for pastoring, counseling, spiritual formation, politics, and public life
• Shows that awakening to the spiritual significance of time is crucial for orienting faith in the 21st century

Contents

• Introduction: When Are We? The Spiritual Significance of Timekeeping
• Meditation 1: Ecclesiastes 3:9-15
• Chapter 1: Creatures of Time: How to Face Our Forgetting
• Chapter 2: A History of the Human Heart: How to Learn from Ghosts
• Meditation 2: Ecclesiastes 7:10-14
• Chapter 3: The Sacred Folds of Kairos: How (Not) to Be Contemporary
• Chapter 4: Embrace the Ephemeral: How to Love What You'll Lose
• Meditation 3: Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:8
• Chapter 5: Seasons of the Heart: How to Inhabit Your Now
• Chapter 6: On Not Living Ahead of Time: How to Sing Maranatha!
• Epilogue: History in Heaven

Recognition and awards:

• ★ Publishers Weekly starred review
• 2023 Christian Book Award® Winner (Christian Living)
• Christianity Today 2023 Book Award Finalist (Christian Living & Spiritual Formation)

Praise for How to Inhabit Time

James K. A. Smith draws from biblical, philosophical, and therapeutic insights to weave our lives into a wondrous drama far greater than can be found in the fleeting and distracting present tense. Along the way he courageously tells his own story of finding hope for the future by reckoning with his past, our past, and God's redemptive event that is still unfolding.

—M. Craig Barnes, president, Princeton Theological Seminary

Jamie Smith is a crucial philosopher and theologian. In a time of frightening upheaval over the nature of identity, we dearly need this wise and winsome book about how to inhabit time well. Listen to Smith unpack a song, a poem, a passage from Ecclesiastes, or a philosopher's lifework, and come away challenged, changed, and delighted.

—Jason Byassee, Vancouver School of Theology

In How to Inhabit Time, James K. A. Smith makes of his boundless knowledge and crystalline thinking a most evocative/provocative succession of scenes--a sensuous narrative that asks us to recalibrate our idea of time so that we might carry ourselves, with grace and gratitude, through it.

—Beth Kephart, author of Wife, Daughter, Self: A Memoir in Essays

Product Details

• Title: How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now
• Author: James K. A. Smith
• Publisher: Brazos
• Print Publication Date: 2022
• Logos Release Date: 2022
• Pages: 189
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Time › Biblical teaching; Bible. Ecclesiastes, III › Criticism, interpretation, etc; Time › Religious aspects--Christianity
• ISBNs: 9781493438648, 9781587435232, 9781587435911, 9781493438624, 9781493438631, 1587435233, 1587435918, 149343862, 1493438638, 149343862X, 1493438646
• Resource ID: LLS:HWNHBTFTHFLLYNW
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-12-16T18:03:50Z

About James K. A. Smith

James K.A. Smith (PhD, Villanova University) is the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was editor in chief of Comment magazine from 2013 to 2018 and is now editor in chief of Image journal. Smith is the author or editor of many books, including the Christianity Today Book Award winners Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? and Desiring the Kingdom, and is editor of the well-received Church and Postmodern Culture series, and has written for Christianity Today, First Things, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Washington Post.