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Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Volume 2 of Cultural Liturgies. By James K. A. Smith. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2013. xx + 198 pp. $22.99 (paper).
Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, the first volume of Smith's projected trilogy was published in 2009 and reviewed in the ATR 94.4 (pp. 772-775). In this second volume the author continues a practice initiated in the first, namely, enhancing his argument by providing illustrative sidebars throughout. These elucidating asides, sometimes brief but in other cases running to several pages (and helpfully set in a different type-style), are comprised variously of apt anecdotes, pertinent poetry, and telling literary excerpts or cinematic analyses. With regard to this last item, his "Picturing Kinaesthetic Conversion in The Kings Speech" is both brilliant in itself and as it illustrates the argument. These considerations are, however, not the only factors that make for what Smith calls a "hybrid" book.
The other blending of the book consists of attention to two audiences at once, namely, scholars and practitioners. The academic argument of the book philosophically concerns the phenomenology...