To be human is to be a lover.
That is the starting point for Jamie Smith’s latest work, Desiring the Kingdom, in which he presents an important challenge to the dominant paradigm in Christian education. While I do not agree with all of Smith’s conclusions, Desiring the Kingdom is one of the most challenging and enriching books I read in 2009, and its proposals deserve serious and substantial consideration.
Smith’s project is similar to that of Spears and Loomis. But while he also wants to construct a pedagogy on top of a robust theological anthropology, his foundation and frame are considerably different. For Smith, most contemporary Christian education is too focused on worldview analysis and “integration.” Smith contends that such approaches rest upon a “reductionistic account of the human person—one that is still a tad bit heady and quasi-cognitive.” Smith contends that these accounts of pedagogy fail “to accord a central role to embodiment and practice.”
Drawing upon Augustine and the phenomenological tradition, Smith argues that instead, humans should be viewed fundamentally, though not exclusively, as lovers, and—post regeneration—primarily as lovers of the Kingdom. Because of this, our nature is to push us outside of ourselves, and so is inherently teleological.
But Smith argues that the fundamentally non-cognitive, affective nature of humanity entails that the telos of love must be construed as a picture, otherwise it will not actually move us. What’s more, Smith contends that these basic desires are “inscribed” into our “dispositions and habits quite apart from our conscious reflection.” Not surprisingly, Smith argues that embodied practices are crucial to forming these pre-conscious habits. He writes:
We feel our way around our world more than we think our way through it. Our worldview is more a matter of the imagination than the intellect, and the imagination runs off the fuel of images that are channeled by the senses. So our affective, noncognitive disposition is an aspect of our animal, bodily nature. The result is a much more holistic (and less dualistic) picture of human persons as essentially embodied.
What has this to do with knowledge and education?
Login to read more
Sign in or create a free account to access Subscriber-only content.
Topics: