Tried With Fire

When I was growing up, I often heard the same questions from my classmates - Do you use chopsticks at home? Do you eat rice every day? Do your parents own a restaurant? Do you speak Chinese? (Answers: Rarely, usually, no, no.) I don't think these kids realized they were imposing a cultural stereotype on me. The stereotype may have been absorbed through ads like the  Calgon Chinese laundry commercial  and other inaccurate depictions of Chinese Americans. I don't know if they consciously knew they were being racist, but these biases have a way of infiltrating our minds. If we never stop to question them and learn otherwise, they remain firmly rooted, and out of the heart the mouth speaks. In You Are What You Love , James K.A. Smith uses stereotypes as an example of how we learn, not through conscious thought, but by habit. Stereotypes are just this sort of unconscious, habituated way of perceiving the world and acting accordingly. No one "signs up" to hold prejudi...

Here are a few more summarizing thoughts on You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith mainly from the 2nd chapter. After making the argument that we are more than thinking things and brains-on-a-stick, it's very reasonable to consider that we might be what we love. But then this question comes up -   what if we don't love what we think we love ? If someone asks me, "What do I love?," I know what the right answer should be just like every kid in Sunday school - Jesus. But what about the competing loves in my heart? The rival kingdoms that fight for my allegiance? And how did they get there in the first place? This is where Smith proposes something that I had never really considered before. We think of habits as something we do, but what if these habits do something to us ? Therefore, the seemingly mindless, seemingly amoral routines, the rituals, and  secular liturgies that we participate in day in and day out may be (probably are) shaping our loves in ways in...

I started reading You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith. I had seen his books referenced in other books, and friends had mentioned this one in particular on social media. It also happened to be on sale. I downloaded an audio version too, which was providential. My daughter picked it up after dinner last night, and I joked that I would find her still reading the book after I got home from a meeting. She was. She also mentioned we might be fighting over the book. It's that good. Smith starts out his book questioning the idea that "You are what you think." We may not even know who Rene Descartes is, but we have absorbed the idea that "I think. Therefore, I am." And if our diet of information is only post Enlightenment, then we have no other frame of reference. So "we imaging human beings as giant bobblehead dolls: with humongous heads, and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies." It "reduces human beings to brains-on-a-s...