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

by James K. A. Smith

Overview

★ Publishers Weekly starred review

2023 Christian Book Award® Winner (Christian Living)
Christianity Today 2023 Book Award Finalist (Christian Living & Spiritual Formation)
Outreach 2023 Recommended Resource (Christian Living)
A "Best Book of 2022," Englewood Review of Books

"This incisive and eloquent volume will expand readers' minds."—Publishers Weekly

"A beautifully written book. . . . [Smith] offers a good, pastoral word to Christians today."—Christian Century

Many Christians live a faith that is "nowhen." They are disconnected from the past or imagine they are somehow "above" the flux of history, as if every generation starts with a clean state. They lack an awareness of time and the effects of history—both personal and collective—and thus are naive about current issues, prone to nostalgia, or fixated on the end times and other doomsday versions of the future.

Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith explains that we must reckon with the past in order to discern the present and have hope for the future. Integrating popular culture, biblical exposition, and meditation, he helps us develop a sense of "temporal awareness" that is attuned to the texture of history, the vicissitudes of life, and the tempo of the Spirit.

Smith shows that awakening to the spiritual significance of time is crucial for orienting faith in the twenty-first century. It allows us to become indebted to the past, oriented toward the future, and faithful in the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587435232
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	398,662
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

James K. A. Smith (PhD, Villanova University) is a popular speaker and the award-winning author of a number of influential books, including Desiring the Kingdom, How (Not) to Be Secular, You Are What You Love, On the Road with Saint Augustine, and How to Inhabit Time. He is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. Smith served as editor in chief of Comment magazine (2013-2018) and Image journal (2019-2024). He has written for Christianity Today, the Christian Century, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/18/2022

Smith (On the Road with Saint Augustine), a philosophy professor at Calvin University, delivers a lyrical exploration of how faith intersects with history and time. He posits that many Christians live “nowhen” and “imagine themselves wholly governed by timeless principles, unchanging convictions, expressing an idealism that assumes they are wholly governed by eternal ideas untainted by history.” This denial of time’s influence, Smith contends, ignores history’s role in shaping the present and blinkers Christians’ “sense of place in God’s story.” The author suggests that history is inescapable, but not predetermined, and that it’s rife with possibilities because there are always aspects of the past that provide “fertile soil for a different future.” He notes that Christians have a distinct way of keeping time because they “are citizens of a kingdom that will arrive from the future,” and he urges them to “inhabit the present” while looking ahead and preparing for the kingdom. The theology’s focus on the temporal dimension of Christianity yields novel insights, and the prose is elegant and lucid. This incisive and eloquent volume will expand readers’ minds. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly