Many of us feel the exhaustion of incessant distraction. Always “on,” our attention is frayed. We are overwhelmed by the noise of the world. We are paralyzed by anxiety.
In a world of dis-information and mis-information, we’re not sure what to think anymore. We find old certainties upended. We feel like we’re fumbling our way in the dark.
In Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, James K.A. Smith suggests that the contemplative stream of Christian spirituality is a resource for us in the maelstrom of the twenty-first century. Learning from guides like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, Smith will invite us to walk the contemplative path: awakening through solitude, listening to silence, dwelling in darkness, to become people who welcome the mystery that we are beloved of God. We can learn to walk this contemplative path, Smith suggests, in the quiet dark of the cinema or the hushed light of the art gallery. The arts provide practice in contemplation that opens us for spiritual transformation.
Registration will begin January 23rd
James K.A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he has taught since 2002. Prior to that he was assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Smith is the award-winning author of many books, including Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor; You Are What You Love; On the Road with Saint Augustine; The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology; and How to Inhabit Time.
Smith served as editor in chief of Image, an arts and literary journal at the intersection of art, faith, and mystery, from 2019 to 2024. Before that he served as editor in chief of Comment magazine. His criticism and cultural commentary have appeared in a wide range of outlets, such as Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, America, and Christian Century as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times.
A widely traveled speaker, Smith has lectured across the U.S. and in Australia, Korea, Sweden, Norway, France, Tunisia, and the UK.
