After I finished reading a secular book about habits, then my wife got Smith’s book from the library, You Are What You Love. It is a more theological/philosophical approach to habits and personal formation. It looked interesting, but I wasn’t going to have time to read it, so I found Smith giving the same material in lecture format at http://www.taylor-edu.ca/audioarchives/serie/35-2014-e-p-wahl-lectures.
Smith seems like a well-read and thoughtful scholar. For example, he cites the previous book I read about habits as background material, and in one of the later lectures he gets into some pretty deep philosophy about the connection between structure, meaning, and Artificial Intelligence. (Two great tidbits: a philosopher who argues that Artificial Intelligence is a long way from ever being able to enjoy a story; and the apocryphal but telling story of TS Elliot reading The Wasteland to an audience, and then responding to someone’s question of what the long poem “means” by simply reading the great work again.)
However, as Smith is giving these lectures to a group of pastors, he makes his applications quite practical. Mainly, he often repeats the phrase, “Without repetition, there is no formation.” He points out how scared we tend to be in our churches of using repetition, doing the same thing week after week, praying the same prayer, etc. We tend to think that spontaneity is more spiritual. But to the contrary, we should rather try to put more thought and richness into what and how we repeat.
Smith also does well at pointing out the spiritual, worship-focused dimensions of secular life: how shopping malls have been built to imitate cathedrals; how shopping seasons have been designed to imitate the church year, etc. Like the other book does, this book shows that the marketing experts are much more aware than the rest of us that people are formed by their habits.
WhatPastorSamIsReading 