Faith Formation Quotes

It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother’s influence. Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children’s needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is mother’s influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child’s basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother’s loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother’s influence and teaching in the home—and how apparent when neglected!

The Father promises us the Holy Spirit so He can take us into a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ—not into religion or a list of rules or a format.

The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.

Anything done in anger can be done better without it!

Most people in America, when they are exposed to the Christian faith, are not being transformed. They take one step into the door, and the journey ends. They are not being allowed, encouraged, or equipped to love or to think like Christ. Yet in many ways a focus on spiritual formation fits what a new generation is really seeking. Transformation is a process, a journey, not a one-time decision.

You are a never-ceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.

By extending love and comfort to the broken places around us, we keep watch with Jesus in his sorrow.

Anxiety is freedom’s possibility; this anxiety alone is, through faith, absolutely formative, since it consumes all finite ends, discovers all their deceptions.

This is what you do when you journal. You are recording God’s grand, epoch-spanning redemptive story as it unfolds in your limited, temporal sphere of existence here on earth. Your journal has the potential to record the continuation of the Holy Spirit’s work in our world!

We need need to unlearn our bent toward a private religion and a public politics - and see our participation in political life as a reflection of our very public faith.

According to the basic narrative of the Old Testament, God’s answer to human dysfunction was the formation of a people after his own heart.

G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, “There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.

Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are “delivered,” through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the pretended concern with children (who suffer worse at the hands of the faithful than any other group). Male and female genital mutilation; the terrifying of infants with hideous fictions about guilt and hell; the wild prohibition of masturbation: religion will never be able to live down the shame with which it has stained itself for generations in this regard, anymore than it can purge its own guilt for the ruining of formative periods of precious life.

What is spiritual formation? The goal of spiritual formation is a maturing faith and a deepening relationship with Jesus Christ, through which we become more like Christ in the living of our everyday lives in the world.

Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous statement is apt here—“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

God calls us to have the strength to trust Him over our hopelessness and to let Him give us the strength to overcome what it is that we feel hopeless to.

The disciple is one who, intent upon becoming Christ-like and so dwelling in his “faith and practice,” systematically and progressively rearranges his affairs to that end.

We need to retrain our brains, our hearts, and our wills to seek a comfort that truly satisfies.

What if our common sense has been negatively influenced by our addiction to comfort?

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. Isaiah 13:21

When Jesus put on flesh, He made human existence “sacred.” Thus, when you are inhabited by Jesus through His Holy Spirit, your life takes on the “sacred” characteristic as well. This does not mean that you become God or incapable of sinning like Jesus was in His incarnation. However, it does mean that something is qualitatively different about you at the core.

Any counseling that does not pursue spiritual formation through an intimate relationship with Jesus by faith as one of its chief goals is not worthy to be called BIBLICAL counseling.

The goal of spiritual direction is spiritual formation—the ever-increasing capacity to live a spiritual life from the heart. A spiritual life cannot be formed without discipline, practice, and accountability.

Because we are invited to be part of God's new creation now, we seek to embody the identity we have been given in Christ. . . . We engage in mission to establish friendships that lead to the formation of a new people in the world.

If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my had. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation.

For example: never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view, especially when dinner is the primary occasion for sibling bickering. Yet even then, members of your little tribe are learning to love their neighbor. And your children are learning something about the faithful promises of a covenant-keeping Lord in the simple routine of that daily promise of dinner together. Then

A single black ant sped across the floor beyond our naked toes, and I wondered why I felt so oppositional. His expression of unflappable faith had touched a profound place, the deep wellspring of my purpose—my future dream I cradled like a soft and formative pearl.

There are no “little obediences.” Every opportunity given us by God, either to obey or to disobey, is an opportunity for that character formation and strengthening of faith that can prepare us for the greater challenges of faith God has in mind for us in the future.

My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church. In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion. I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.

The sacralization of the political is a reality parallel to developments in our churches:  we've blurred the line between patriotism and faithful Christian practice, we've allowed church services to take on nationalistic dimensions, and we've elevated the nation to the level of loyalty the church alone should occupy.

The most politically significant aspect of our faith is the reality that it is birthed and nurtured in an alternate political community that severs another king and awaits another kingdom.  Jesus wasn't making converts - individuals who would pledge their individual support of him as a religious leader - but citizens of a new kingdom.

Jesus-centered spiritual formation is the process of being transformed into the image of Christ, through a relationship of intimacy with God, by the power of the Spirit, in order to live a good and beautiful life of faith, hope, love, joy, and peace—a life that will be a blessing to oneself and to others and will glorify God now and for all eternity. — James Bryan Smith

No less important than the ideal of martyrdom was that of virginity, which also goes back to the first age of the Church. Indeed the two ideals were associated - first by the cult of virgin martyrs, like St. Agnes, which was so popular, and secondly by the idea that virginity was a kind of living martyrdom, a witness to the power of the faith to transcend human weakness.

It is the cultures of the great world religions which have shaped the course of civilization, and these possess a kind of supercultural position. (...) The three great religions of the East - Confucianism, Brahmanism and Buddhism - and the three world religions in the West - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have been the great unifying factors in the civilization of the world. They are, as it were, the spiritual highways, which have led mankind through history from remote antiquity down to modern times. (...) In the past all these world religions with the exception of Judaism have been what I have termed supercultures - common forms of faith and moral order which embraced and united large numbers of previously existing cultures with their own languages and histories.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle within them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth. O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations, Through Christ Our Lord, Amen.

We want our children to obey God because they do not want to cause grief to the one who loves them. As they become aware of their moral failures, we also want them to discover that their loving God forgives and wants to help children to do the right thing. The importance of the initial love relationship with God cannot be overemphasized; everything else in spiritual formation builds on it in the proper time.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not... Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?

we must do more than pay lip service to questioning well; within the church, questioning must be modeled, integrated into the lives of our saints so that those who are young, and young in the faith, can see what the sanctification of our exploration looks like. If people are given little by way of formation, then it is folly to expect much from them. And if we do not like the intellectual fruit our communities produce, then we would do well to begin by reexamining their vines.

Many modern Christians think of the New Testament as a book outside of history, something that was just suddenly there. Historians of Christianity, able to trace its gradual authorship and formation, nonetheless typically find themselves describing this development as an anonymous process, a spontaneous evolution accomplished by the nameless and faceless members of ancient communities of faith. ... But when it comes to the origin of the New Testament, we ought to do better, and we can.

Order Out of Chaos ... At the right temperature ... two peptide molecules will stay together long enough on average to find a third. Then the little trio finds a fourth peptide to attract into the little huddle, just through the random side-stepping and tumbling induced by all the rolling water molecules. Something extraordinary is happening: a larger structure is emerging from a finer system, not in spite of the chaotic and random motion of that system but because of it. Without the chaotic exploration of possibilities, the rare peptide molecules would never find each other, would never investigate all possible ways of aggregating so that the tape-like polymers emerge as the most likely assemblies. It is because of the random motion of all the fine degrees of freedom that the emergent, larger structures can assume the form they do. Even more is true when the number of molecules present becomes truly enormous, as is automatically the case for any amount of matter big enough to see. Out of the disorder emerges a ... pattern of emergent structure from a substrate of chaos.... The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology -- all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them.... Even the structures and phenomena that we find most beautiful of all, those that make life itself possible, grow up from roots in a chaotic underworld. Were the chaos to cease, they would wither and collapse, frozen rigid and lifeless at the temperatures of intergalactic space. This creative tension between the chaotic and the ordered lies within the foundations of science today, but it is a narrative theme of human culture that is as old as any. We saw it depicted in the ancient biblical creation narratives of the last chapter, building through the wisdom, poetic and prophetic literature. It is now time to return to those foundational narratives as they attain their climax in a text shot through with the storm, the flood and the earthquake, and our terrifying ignorance in the face of a cosmos apparently out of control. It is one of the greatest nature writings of the ancient world: the book of Job.

It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken this part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection. We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.

How does that happen? I’m suggesting that Christian education has, for too long, been concerned with information rather than formation; thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a Christian perspective, an intellectual framework, because they see themselves as fostering individual “minds in the making.”[6] Hand in hand with that, such an approach reduces Christianity to a denuded intellectual framework that has diminished bite because such an intellectualized rendition of the faith doesn’t touch our core passions. This is because such intellectualization of Christianity allows it to be unhooked from the thick practices of the church. When the Christianity of “Christian education” is reduced to the intellectual elements of a Christian worldview or a Christian perspective, the result is that Christianity is turned “into a belief system available to the individual without mediation by the church.”[

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve.” There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal faith in progress which inspired the nineteenth century was itself a substitute for the simpler and more positive religious faith which was the vital bond of the Western community. If we wish to understand our past and the inheritance of Western culture, we have to go behind the nineteenth century development and study the old spiritual community of Western Christendom as an objective historical reality.

Juneja had noticed that the white activists were very focused on rules. “They ask questions I’ve not ever heard from women-of-color organizations, like ‘Do we need permits to canvas?’ They are very hierarchy-oriented, very rules-oriented in a way I have not seen when organizing with people of color.” She suggested that one of the reasons the town-hall format had caught on in 2017 was that “white people, even white women, have faith that if they voice their opinions to their representatives, that they will be heard, that they will have influence, that they have a political voice to which officials will be responsive.” Black and brown people, Juneja said, know that they have representatives, and know how government works. “But there is no faith that politicians will see that there is any cost to disappointing black and brown people. But these women believe that you work through making calls and going to town halls because you assume that they will care what you have to say.

what one grasps of reality—through senses and thought—has as much to do with one’s subjective posture toward reality as it does with what is objectively there to be perceived and thought about. If we do not, by our own volition and humility, “hunger and thirst” after reality, or if we live without a love of the truth—no matter how much it challenges our prior commitments—then the truth will simply pass us by (see Mt 5:6 and 2 Thess 2:10). We will be left with our own dwindling resources, attempting to forge out an increasingly futile existence, living in denial of what we suspect might be true. You see it every day. One can avoid acknowledging reality, but one cannot avoid the consequences of refusing to acknowledge reality. Everything in Dallas Willard’s academic and personal life pointed toward (he would be the first to insist, far from perfectly) the active presence of God in the world. He thought that every single point of reality was shot through with unfathomable order and wonder, patiently waiting to be discovered.

In the first case, the religious association succumbs to destruction from within, its organism becomes subordinated to goals completely different from the original idea, and its theosophic and moral values fall prey to characteristic deformation, thereupon serving as a disguise for domination by pathological individuals. The religious idea then becomes both a justification for using force and sadism against non-believers, heretics, and sorcerers, and a conscience drug for people who put such inspirations into effect. Anyone criticizing such a state of affairs is condemned with paramoral indignation, allegedly in the name of the original idea and faith in God, but actually because he feels and thinks within the categories of normal people. Such a system retains the name of the original religion and many other specific names, swearing on the prophet’s beard while using this for its doubletalk. Something which was to be originally an aid in the comprehension of God’s truth now scourges nations with the sword of imperialism.

The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon's formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not 'live' in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.

I haven't re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person's writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can't get into the castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book - and universe that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this.

Questions and Topics for Discussion This book is written in an oral history format. Why do you think the author chose to structure the book this way? How does this approach affect your reading experience? At one point Daisy says, “I was just supposed to be the inspiration for some man’s great idea….I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse.” How does her experience of being used by others contribute to the decisions she makes when she joins The Six? Why do you think Billy has such a strong need to control the group, both early on when they are simply the Dunne Brothers and later when they become Daisy Jones & The Six? There are two sets of brothers in The Six: Eddie and Pete Loving, and Billy and Graham Dunne. How do these sibling relationships affect the band? Daisy, Camila, Simone, and Karen are each very different embodiments of female strength and creativity. Who are you most drawn to and why? Billy and Daisy become polarizing figures for the band. Who in the book gravitates more toward Billy’s leadership, and who is more inclined to follow Daisy’s way of doing things? How do these alliances change over time, and how does this dynamic upset the group’s balance? Why do you think Billy and Daisy clash so strongly? What misunderstandings between them are revealed through the “author’s” investigation? What do you think of Camila’s decision to stand by Billy, despite the ways that he has hurt her through his trouble with addiction and wavering faithfulness?

167. Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis).129 Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendor and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism130 which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful,131 the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables.”132 We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others. 168.

Here is my six step process for how we will first start with ISIS and then build an international force that will fight terrorism and corruption wherever it appears. “First, in dedication to Lieutenant Commander McKay, Operation Crapshoot commenced at six o’clock this morning. I’ve directed a handpicked team currently deployed in Iraq to coordinate a tenfold increase in aerial bombing and close air support. In addition to aerial support, fifteen civilian security companies, including delegations from our international allies, are flying special operations veterans into Iraq. Those forces will be tasked with finding and annihilating ISIS, wherever they walk, eat or sleep. I’ve been told that they can’t wait to get started. “Second, going forward, our military will be a major component in our battle against evil. Militaries need training. I’ve been assured by General McMillan and his staff that there is no better final training test than live combat. So without much more expenditure, we will do two things, train our troops of the future, and wipe out international threats. “Third, I have a message for our allies. If you need us, we will be there. If evil raises its ugly head, we will be with you, arm in arm, fighting for what is right. But that aid comes with a caveat. Our allies must be dedicated to the common global ideals of personal and religious freedom. Any supposed ally who ignores these terms will find themselves without impunity. A criminal is a criminal. A thief is a thief. Decide which side you’re on, because our side carries a big stick. “Fourth, to the religious leaders of the world, especially those of Islam, though we live with differing traditions, we are still one people on this Earth. What one person does always has the possibility of affecting others. If you want to be part of our community, it is time to do your part. Denounce the criminals who besmirch your faith. Tell your followers the true meaning of the Koran. Do not let the money and influence of hypocrites taint your religion or your people. We request that you do this now, respectfully, or face the scrutiny of America and our allies. “Fifth, starting today, an unprecedented coalition of three former American presidents, my predecessor included, will travel around the globe to strengthen our alliances. Much like our brave military leaders, we will lead from the front, go where we are needed. We will go toe to toe with any who would seek to undermine our good intentions, and who trample the freedoms of our citizens. In the coming days you will find out how great our resolve truly is. “Sixth, my staff is in the process of drafting a proposal for the members of the United Nations. The proposal will outline our recommendations for the formation of an international terrorism strike force along with an international tax that will fund ongoing anti-terrorism operations. Only the countries that contribute to this fund will be supported by the strike force. You pay to play.

Part of the irony of religion’s role is that in strengthening micro bonds between individuals, religion contributes to within-group homogeneity, heightens isolation from different groups, and reduces the opportunity for the formation of macro bonds—bonds between groups—that serve to integrate a society.

Adults identify as Christians typically because they had formative experiences as a child or as a teenager that connected them to Christianity. But that connection is often shallow and on the surface, having more to do with cultural identification than it does with deep faith. And our research shows that Mosaics do not share the cultural identification of previous generations.

Seek not to speak, but that you might have something to say.

evangelism can never be only proclamation or invitation, for it begins logically (even if not always chronologically) in allowing ourselves to be narrated by that story. Apart from our own formation into that story through baptism, worship, and the various practices and patterns of ecclesial life, we do not have the capacity to be faithful “rememberers” of the story, much less narrators or “counternarrators” of the story to others.

I remember a time I went to him with a more personal problem: “Hey Dallas, my heart is breaking, I can’t fix it, I don’t understand it, and I’m sadder than I’ve ever been in my life.” There was a long pause. With Dallas there’s always a long pause. And then he said, “This will be a test of your joyful confidence in God.

My people perish from lack of knowledge” (Hos 4:6).

For our Christian groups and their leaders, it means that there is a simple, straightforward way in which congregations of Jesus’ people can, without exception, fulfill his call to be an ecclesia, his “called out” ones: a touch point between heaven and earth, where the healing of the Cross and the Resurrection can save the lost and grow the saved into the fullness of human beings in Christ. No special facilities, programs, talents, or techniques are required. It doesn’t even require a budget. Just faithfulness to the process of spiritual formation in Christlikeness exposed in the Scriptures and in the lives of his “peculiar people” through the ages (Titus 2:14, KJV).

Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf.

The experience of missing a loved one is a small clue that we were made for eternity. Dallas would be the first to insist that the overarching point of his life was not his presence, but rather, like the intentionality of thoughts itself, the grand and beautiful realities he was pointing to. It’s all there, if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, minds to think and hearts to feel. The rest is the adventure of our lives.

The possibility of knowledge is relevant to Dallas’s account of the spiritual life. The point of his books The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart is that we must adopt specific practices in order to deepen our apprehension of God’s activity in the world. If we fail to sharpen our perception of the great spiritual truths as revealed in the life of Christ, God’s kingdom, in all its life-transforming richness and power, will simply pass us by. Again, you see it happen every day.

Think, my love. Visualize what I put in your head. Trust me as you have never trusted me before. Allow me to give you this gift. There was no hesitation on her part. With complete faith in him, Raven gave herself into his keeping, reaching eagerly for the vision. The slight discomfort, the strange disorientation as her physical body dissolved, did not faze her. Feathers shimmered, sprouted. Beside her, Jacques stepped back, allowing the smaller female owl to hop onto a tall stone angel before his own large frame compressed, reshaped. Together they launched themselves into the night and soared high to join the other four powerful birds circling above them. One of the males broke formation, circled the female, and dipped close to cover her body with one wide wingspan. Playfully she dropped low to slide away. The other males walled her in, curbing her antics as she learned the joys of free flying. The male owls stayed in close formation, the female in the center, circling above the forest, climbing high into the mist. For a space of time they dipped and swirled, clearly playing, soaring high, plunging toward earth, pulling up to fly through trees and over the heavy blanket of fog. After some time they settled into a leisurely flight, once more with the males protectively surrounding the female. Mikhail felt the night remove every vestige of tension and dissipate it to the four corners of the earth. He would take Raven far away from the village, give her plenty of time to learn Carpathian ways. She represented the future of their race, his future. She was his life, his joy, his reason for existing. She was his hold on all that was good in the world. He intended to see that her life was filled with nothing but happiness. Mikhail dropped lower to cover her feathered body with his, touching her mind, feeling her joy. Raven responded by filling his mind with love and warmth and a child’s wondrous laughter at the new sights and sounds and smells she was experiencing. She raced him across the sky, her laughter echoing in all their minds. She was their hope for the future.

The modern process of identity formation, however, tells you to go out and create a self from scratch. You must identify your dreams, especially the most vivid ones, and fulfill them—or feel like a failure. That prospect crushes those in many segments of our society where money, looks, power, success, sophistication, and romantic love all become not just good things but necessary identity factors.

Christian formation is more than concepts and creeds. What is required is a lifelong transformation at the hands of the Master Artist through the use of specific tools of the Spirit. The phrase Benedict uses, instrumenta artis spiritalis, literally means 'instruments of spiritual arts.' He viewed the faith community as God's workshop or art studio--a place where God's artwork in our soul takes place.

believe our only hope for leaders to increasingly work in the way of Jesus, for the glory of Jesus, in the power of Jesus and under the direction of Jesus will be as they have passed through stages that help them learn the soul work of surrender, abandonment, contentment and participation. There simply are no shortcuts.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

Formative commendation to the author as an altar boy: "You're the only one we've got to anticipates what's coming.

As after any revolution, purists were vigilant for signs of ideological backsliding and departures from the one true faith. The 1780s and 1790s were to be especially rich in feverish witch hunts for traitors who allegedly sought to reverse the verdict of the war. For the radicals of the day, revolutionary purity meant a strong legislature that would overshadow a weak executive and judiciary. For Hamilton, this could only invite legislative tyranny. Rutgers v. Waddington represented his first major chance to expound the principle that the judiciary should enjoy coequal status with the other two branches of government. If Rutgers v. Waddington made Hamilton a controversial figure in city politics in 1784, the founding of the Bank of New York cast him in a more conciliatory role. The creation of New York’s first bank was a formative moment in the city’s rise as a world financial center. Banking was still a new phenomenon in America. The first such chartered institution, the Bank of North America, had been started in Philadelphia in 1781, and Hamilton had studied its affairs closely. It was the brainchild of Robert Morris, and its two biggest shareholders were Jeremiah Wadsworth and Hamilton’s brother-in-law John B. Church. These two men now cast about for fresh outlets for their capital. In 1783, John Church sailed for Europe with Angelica and their four children to settle wartime accounts with the French government. In his absence, Church named Hamilton as his American business agent, a task that was to consume a good deal of his time in coming years. When Church and Wadsworth deputized him to set up a private bank in New York, Hamilton warmed to it as a project that could help to rejuvenate New York commerce. He was stymied by a competing proposal from Robert R. Livingston to set up a “land bank”—so called because the initial capital would be pledged mostly in land, an idea Hamilton derided as a “wild and impracticable scheme.” 49 Since land is not a liquid asset and cannot be converted into ready cash in an emergency, Hamilton favored a more conservative bank that would conduct business exclusively in notes and gold and silver coins. When Livingston solicited the New York legislature for a charter, the tireless Hamilton swung into action and mobilized New York’s merchants against the effort. He informed Church that he had lobbied “some of the most intelligent merchants, who presently saw the matter in a proper light and began to take measures to defeat the plan.

Islam is in a formative period struggling to consolidate the vast reach won by both inspiration and force at its founding. Two centuries along, the faith of Muhammad hangs like an intricate veil: a religion still searching for institutional wholeness, a set of lessons to live by.

The secret to extraordinary faith is fully engaging our MINDS, as well as our hearts, because DYNAMIC FAITH REQUIRES A HEALTHY BALANCE OF BOTH.

Others have passed faith onto us and we borrow those customs and traditions that help form us. But, sometimes, we also need to adopt new practices that helps us on the journey.

listen humbly to all the different voices arising in the biblical library. Wisdom emerges from the conversation among these voices, voices we could arrange in five broad categories. First, there are the voices of the priests who emphasize keeping the law, maintaining order, offering sacrifices, and faithfully maintaining traditions and taboos. Then there are the voices of the prophets, often in tension with the priests, who emphasize social justice, care for the poor, and the condition of the heart. Next are the poets who express the full range of human emotion and opinion—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then come the sages who, in proverb, essay, and creative fiction, record their theories, observations, questions, and doubts. And linking them together are storytellers, each with varying agendas, who try to tell the stories of the people who look back to Abraham as their father, Moses as their liberator, David as their greatest king, and God as their Creator and faithful companion.

Christ died to make us free. The faith, what it means, and then the habits of life that protect a life of faith, are part of personal formation in the truth, and the church should attend to those dimensions as much as she possibly can.

Every intellectual project of a political kind should follow a number of basic principles1) Be deeply suspicious of anything that masks itself in universal regalia. Bring into question that which is not being questioned in the normal state of affairs. (2) Move beyond any self-righteous and self-absolving assessments of the operations of power. Look to deal with power at the level of its effects and the ways in which it positively manipulates subjects to wilfully abandon their own political freedoms. (3) Foreground the affirmative qualities of subjectivities. Not only is this integral in the fight against fascism in all its forms. It opens a challenge to the narcissism of those who would have us surrender to the mercies of the world. (4) Speak with confidence about the ability to transform the world, not for the better, but for the sake of it. Without an open commitment to the people to come, the struggle is already lost. (5) Use provocation as a political tool. Not to evidence extremist views. But to illustrate how normalizing power truly fears anything that appears remotely exceptional. The poetic most certainly included. (6) Trust in the irreducible qualities of human existence. The feelings we have, the atmospheres we breathe, the aesthetics we enfold, the fables we scribe, the playful personas we construct, they are all integral to the formation of a new image of thought. (7) Have faith in people. Just as they will resist what they find oppressive and intolerable, so they will also find their own dignified solutions to problems in spite of our best efforts. (8) Do not shy away from conflict. Without conflict there is no resistance to power. And without resistance to power there is no creation of alternative existences. (9) Reveal fully your political orientations. Do not abstract them from the work. Such a deception is of the order for those embarrassed by the mediocrity of their power. (10) Speak with the courage to truth that narrates a tale to affect a number of meaningful registers. No book should be read if it doesn't intellectually challenge and emotionally move us.

work of seeking to be a mentor to your children, seeking to pass on a spiritual formation that creates a live faith, giving the training required to develop godly character, and creating a love for learning is absolutely one of the most profound works of our whole society and world.

As passé as it may sound to cynical ears, if we want faith in Jesus to remain realistically possible in a secular age, one of the most valuable things we can do is bring children to church. We need to raise children in the community that is formed and sustained by the grand narrative of Scripture—a story that culminates in the gospel of Jesus Christ. In an irreligious culture where not much is sacred, we need to introduce children to the sacred place where sacrament is formative and faith is normative. Christian faith cannot long be sustained as a private opinion held by a lone individual. Christianity is not a solo project. Even though you may stubbornly maintain some kind of faith in Jesus without belonging to a church, your children probably will not, and your grandchildren almost certainly will not. One of the essential tasks of the church is to pass on the faith from one generation to another, and without the church this is nearly impossible. If we’re interested in our children and grandchildren sharing our faith, we need the church.

In 1942 the Vatican issued bulls framing the Americas as terra nullius, and lands that were not under the control of the Christian faith were considered empty wastelands, up for grabs. This doctrine relied on the invention of Indigenous peoples as savages 'without society, sovereignty, or private property', too primitive to embody political authority, and justified European invasions. Terra nullius was a Christian 'law of nations', but it shaped the formation of international law, which has historically treated Indigenous peoples as sovereign nullius.

As passé as it may sound to cynical ears, if we want faith in Jesus to remain realistically possible in a secular age, one of the most valuable things we can do is bring children to church. We need to raise  children in the community that is formed and sustained by the grand narrative of Scripture—a story that culminates in the gospel of Jesus Christ. In an irreligious culture where not much is sacred, we need to introduce children to the sacred place where sacrament is formative and faith is normative.

The greatest mistake you can make is to assume all Muslims are the same. They are not simply fundamentalist jihadist extremists or moderates. One difference between moderates and jihadists is patience. They both desire Sharia to be imposed around the world; they simply seek different means to achieve this same end. Moderates are distinct from reformers as well. Reformers recognize the West views Islam as dangerous, that Sharia is politically incompatible and should therefore not be imposed everywhere on everyone. Even with these distinctions, it’s important to note that the greatest historical divide within the Muslim community is between Sunnis and Shiites. Although the Muslim ummah is bound by its Islamic identity, it is not absolutely free from internal strife. In fact, from the faith’s inception, strife within the Muslim community has resulted in civil wars, the formation of terrorist organizations, and so much more. The ummah bond is probably the weakest regarding who is the leader of the Islamic world. The approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world1 are divided primarily into two large groups, Sunnis and Shiites. Prior to his death in AD 632, Muhammad had not designated a successor to lead the Muslim ummah. As a result, Muhammad’s death caused a split among his followers concerning who should be Muhammad’s rightful successor, which in turn led to the creation of these two sects. Both Sunnis and Shiites consider adherents of the other sect to be heretical. Their rivalry continues to this day and often results in attacks on the members of the opposing sect, including civil wars and battles that rip nations apart and have destabilized the Middle East.

The Form of Government in Islam In the view of Islam, government does not derive from the interests of a class, nor does it serve the domination of an individual or a group. Rather, it represents the fulfillment of the political ideal of a people who bear a common faith and common outlook, taking an organized form in order to initiate the process of intellectual and ideological evolution towards the final goal, i.e., movement toward Allah. Our nation, in the course of its revolutionary developments, has cleansed itself of the dust and impurities that accumulated during the past and purged itself of foreign ideological influences, returning to authentic intellectual standpoints and worldview of Islam. It now intends to establish an ideal and model society on the basis of Islamic norms. The mission of the Constitution is to realize the ideological objectives of the movement and to create conditions conducive to the development of man in accordance with the noble and universal values of Islam. With due attention to the Islamic content of the Iranian Revolution, the Constitution provides the necessary basis for ensuring the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad. In particular, in the development of international relations, the Constitution will strive with other Islamic and popular movements to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community (in accordance with the Koranic verse “This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), and to assure the continuation of the struggle for the liberation of all deprived and oppressed peoples in the world.

Moral formation and the imitation of Christ are nothing new, even if their challenges must be taken up anew by each of us. The practices, disciplines, and virtues that shape good character have been part of the conversation in the Christian tradition for centuries.

Of course intellectual, theological, philosophical, exegetical formation and diplomas are important, but the treasure does not lie in knowledge. . . . The real treasure is our friendship with God. Without a priesthood according to God’s Heart, cleansed of human ways, the Church has no future. I am not minimizing the role of the baptized people, the people of God. But by the will of God, these souls are entrusted to priests. If the latter obey merely human rules, without heavenly charity, the Church will lose her sense of mission. The crises in the Church, as serious as they may be, always have their origins in a crisis of the priesthood. Does

Missiologists have in recent years begun to think seriously about inculturation, and historians have begun to learn from them. When the Christian message is inserted into a cultural framework, if the messengers are insensitive to the local culture the result can be cultural imperialism. On the other hand, if they grant too much hegemony to the local culture, the result at best is 'syncretism' and at worst 'Christo-paganism.' Things are most wholesome when sensitive interchange takes place leading to 'a truly critical symbiosis.' But for this to happen, there must be a second stage - a time of 'pastoral follow-up work,' of catechizing and life formation enabling the new faith to express its genius in the institutions and reflexes of its new host culture.

But the Spirit saith expressly, that in later times some shall fall away from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, [4:2] through the hypocrisy of men that speak lies, branded in their own conscience as with a hot iron; [4:3] forbidding to marry, [and commanding] to abstain from meats, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by them that believe and know the truth.

This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.

IF A PROBLEM PERSISTS for generations, it is no longer a crisis. It’s a condition. The identity crisis facing our faith, our families, and our world has prevailed so long it is now a condition—a condition of shadows and storms, yielding a world of confusion and conflict, unruly souls, and unraveling societies. As both consequence and contributing factor, eating has become not so much a God-designed daily routine of identity formation as a function, a procedure to ingest the energy we need to keep going, or a therapy of comfort foods to alleviate our anxieties.

On the field of play, in the heat of the action, it enabled Guardiola’s Barcelona to switch formations or positions as many as five or six times in the same game. When players understand why, it is easy to react to what is being shouted from the touchline in the heat of battle. However, Guardiola also drilled patience into his sides, because, despite that ability to get his team to react, he and his players also had enough faith in their strategy to know when to avoid a knee-jerk reaction to a tough passage of play or an opposition goal.

we have let discipleship languish in far too many young lives. Our enthusiasm for evangelism is not matched by our passion for and patience with discipleship and faith formation.

Salette, France (1846) The next apparition at La Salette happened four years later, in 1846. High up in the French Alps, Mary appeared to two children—Maximin, eleven; and Mélanie, fourteen—as they tended sheep. What they saw when they came upon her was unique among apparitions; she sat as a lady sobbing, her hands covering her face in grief. Indeed, looking at the turmoil in France and beyond, Mary had much to grieve over. France’s anti-Catholic streak had even reached the small village of La Salette, where Mass and the sacraments were neglected as fewer and fewer people valued the faith of their fathers. Cursing was preferred to prayer, sexual license erased purity, and greed and self-indulgence superseded piety and sacrifice. Even the children to whom Mary appeared had little faith or formation. They rarely went to Mass and were barely able to muddle through the Our Father or Hail Mary. The messages from La Salette are significant because of their length and detail.

The apocalyptic belief in the consummation of history, the inevitability of socialism, and the natural sequence of 'social formations'; the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', the exhalation of violence, faith in the automatic efficacy of nationalizing industry, fantasies concerning a society without conflict and an economy without money—all these have nothing to do with the idea of democratic socialism. The latter's purpose is to create institutions which can gradually reduce the subordination of production to profit, do away with poverty, diminish inequality, remove social barriers to educational opportunity, and minimize the threat to democratic liberties from state bureaucracy and the seductions of totalitarianism.

Now the realm of feelings may appear on first approach to be an area of total chaos. But this is not so. There is also an order among feelings, and it is a much simpler one than most people think. When we properly cultivate, with divine assistance, those few feelings that should be prominent in our lives, the remainder will fall into place. What then are the feelings that will dominate in a life that has been inwardly transformed to be like Christ? They are the feelings associated with love, joy, and peace... [which] are not mere feelings, but conditions of the whole person which are accompanied by characteristic positive feelings. Love, joy, and peace are--we recall--the three fundamental pieces of the fruit (note the singular) of the spirit. They mutually interpenetrate and inform one another, and naturally express themselves in the remainder of that *one* fruit: patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

We can see, then, how conflicts arose in the formation of Christianity between those restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path to self-discovery and the institutional framework that gave to the great majority of people religious sanction and ethical direction for their daily lives. Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring. Gnostic Christianity proved no match for the orthodox faith, either in terms of orthodoxy's wide popular appeal...or in terms of its effective organization. To the impoverishment of Christian tradition, gnosticism, which offered alternatives to what became the main thrust of Christian orthodoxy, was forced outside.

Being full of both grace and truth is part of his glory revealed. It’s not a balancing act. The goal is to max out both, neglecting neither. This fullness defined Jesus, yet our pendulum tends to swing a mile to the left or a mile to the right, depending on what our formative faith environment emphasized. Very few of us have been nurtured toward both. Some of us grew up in a truth-focused faith environment or church. Typically, these environments value doctrine over method or, at the bare minimum, focus more on Scripture, study, and obedience than on understanding freedom and grace. While this environment may result in a more developed view of a doctrinal gospel, it often lacks the ability to empathize appropriately during a situational or social issue. Our default becomes a form of legalism, and our confidence is often misinterpreted as arrogance or even judgment. Conversely, some of us grew up in a grace-focused faith environment or church. Typically, it is these “it’s the heart that matters” environments that often value the how over the what. The life that accompanies this focus is often expressed outside the walls of a church service or Bible study. Our default is grace, at times seemingly at the expense of truth, and our freedom is often misinterpreted as being too compromising. Those of us who grew up in truth-focused environments most likely struggle with extending grace to ourselves and others. Those of us who grew up in grace-focused environments most likely struggle with applying truth to ourselves and others. And so we clash when we come together to pursue gospel living, not always realizing the reason we see things so differently. What can we do about this? Knowing where our roots lie is a great place to start. From there we can ask the questions, Do I need to apply more truth to this situation, issue, or relationship, or do I need to extend more grace? and, How is my perspective perhaps skewed by my faith environment background?

the public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

Because unconscious thoughts and muscle movements originate outside of conscious awareness, he argued, they feel alien and are readily interpreted as originating with spirits or other entities.19 The unconscious, as an “other” inside, is, when you think about it, really a very “occult” idea. Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion”20 naturally invited a suspicious rationalist skepticism in return. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, could not abide an unconscious formation in the psyche. To him, it smacked of bad faith, inauthenticity, the failure to take responsibility for our actions. For instance, he pointed out the contradiction inherent in the idea of a “censor” in the mind that could be aware enough of what it was censoring to form a judgment yet also be completely alien to our conscious experience. The “resistance” that impedes patients from developing self-insight implies a similar non-aware awareness: “the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can resist.”21 There is no unconscious, Sartre argued, just the avoidance of responsibility. Claims of an unconscious mind that could only be explored through a highly subjective process of interpretation also offended the philosopher of science Karl Popper, one of Freud’s harshest critics. How would you test claims about an unconscious? Psychoanalysis is not a science, Popper contended, not only because its claims cannot be falsified but also because the clinical situation, with suggestible patients in a kind of trance-like thrall to their doctor, is an echo chamber—a machine for producing evidence in support of its premises (the usual meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy”).22 Although 20th-century psychological science and neuroscience rejected Freud (and ignored Freud’s contemporaries in psychical research), it ultimately came around to embracing some notion of an unconscious—or what came to be called “implicit processing”—as a domain of cognitive functioning that is hypersensitive to subliminal signals and much quicker at making inferences and judgments than the conscious mind. Abundant experimental evidence shows implicit processing’s overriding dominance over anything like conscious will. A large school of thought, much of it inspired by Benjamin Libet’s work described in the preceding chapter, holds that we are mere spectators of our lives and that conscious will is an illusion, a kind of overlay. If the unconscious was for Freud the submerged majority of the iceberg, for some contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, it is all submerged—the tip is a mirage. We are unaware of the bulk of what seems to occur in our heads—there is thinking, sensing, and feeling that is not thought, sensed, or felt, and our non-experience of this huge domain is much more than a matter of bad faith (although there is that also). As with Freud’s unconscious, you can only probe the implicit domain indirectly, obliquely, via tools and paradigms such as priming tasks, like the ones Daryl Bem inverted in some of his “feeling the future” experiments.

never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view, especially when dinner is the primary occasion for sibling bickering. Yet even then, members of your little tribe are learning to love their neighbor. And your children are learning something about the faithful promises of a covenant-keeping Lord in the simple routine of that daily promise of dinner together.

Instead of instruction in the faith that is centered on an abstract framework of doctrine lifted from the outline of systematic theology, liturgical catechesis is an induction into the faith that begins from what Christians do when we gather to pray around Word and Table. It is learning that is rooted in prayer. It is discipleship that bubbles up from worship. It is a pedagogy that is rooted in the conviction that we pray before we know, we worship before we “worldview.” The worshipers the Father desires (John 4:23) are formed, not just informed. That formation should begin with children’s ministry that grabs hold of the imagination.

US teenagers who retain and grow in their faith are most significantly influenced by their parents. But there is a crucial second tier of relationships in their formation: nonfamilial adults who encourage them and speak into their lives. Those religiously serious teens they call “The Devoted . . . have a larger number of nonparental adults in their lives whom they can turn to for support, advice, and help. Moreover, the parents of the more religiously serious teens are more likely to know more of the supportive adults in their teen children’s lives well enough to talk to them, expanding what sociologists call ‘network closure’ around religious teens. . . . In sum, the lives of more religious teens are, compared to less religious teens, statistically more likely . . . to be linked to and surrounded by adults, particularly nonparental adults who know and care about them and who themselves have social ties to the teens’ parents.”b