How to Inhabit Time

Summary: Framed as three meditations on Ecclesiastes, Smith wants us to pay attention to our presence in time as part of an embrace of our humanity. 

James KA Smith has greatly influenced me over the years. Desiring the Kingdom helped me think about how culture forms us and how we need to pay attention to cultural formation as part of spiritual formation. Imagining the Kingdom oriented me toward spiritual formation as practice, not information acquisition. You Are What You Love I have read twice and can be thought of as a popular level combination of the first two Kingdom books. Still, it also gives language to how spiritual formation works, which I find helpful in my work as a spiritual director. The Fall of Interpretation was part of several books that helped me grapple with hermeneutics and epistemology. The primary thought of our finitude as a feature of our created humanity and not solely as a result of our sin has been significant. As I have said many times before, I am not reformed. Still, if I were to be, it would be because of books like Letters to a Young Calvinist, which presents reformed thought as fundamentally oriented around covenant instead of TULIP or election. Said another way, reformed theology is about ecclesiology more than soteriology. But really, it is a book about Christian maturity. This introduction is already too long, but there are more books of Smith's that I have read and influenced me, and I will keep reading him because his writing has so influenced me.

How to Inhabit Time is hard to describe. Like pretty much all of Smith's books, it is oriented toward spiritual formation. It is written at a more popular level than some of his books, but also still has a lot of discussion of philosophy. It is more memoir oriented and confessional than any of his other books. (I hope that Smith will write a fuller memoir or autobiography at some point. I know quite a bit of his story from reading his books, articles, interviews, and talks, but I think there is more.)

How to Inhabit Time wants to remind the reader that time is essential. Similar to the point of Fall of Interpretation, time is a marker of our created finitude. The fourth chapter about embracing the ephemeral may not make intuitive sense, but it makes experiential sense when you realize that all things will pass away. Accepting that all things will pass away reframes how we think of time and can free us from being bound by concerns of time and legacy.

Part of what I love about Smith is that while he is a philosopher, he isn't oriented toward philosophy for the sake of philosophy but toward philosophy as a way to think about spiritual formation and the limits of reason detached from practice in helping us to think about God and faith.

I did see complaints about discussions of history, race, and justice in a few other reviews in How to Inhabit Time. This is not a book on social justice broadly, but the negative comments prove his point that we can only see the present well if we understand it contextually within history. So many current political and social disagreements are rooted in having a different understanding of our history. That is not to say that all issues are differences in framing our history, but these are theological and philosophical issues, not just historical ones.

I picked up How to Inhabit Time as an audiobook because it was on sale for 1/3 of the price of the kindle book. I have several of Smith's books on audiobook. And I am always mixed on that as a choice. On the one hand, I pretty much always finish audiobooks. But, on the other hand, I know Smith's voice from listening to so many talks and interviews, and I wish he would narrate his books. Other people narrating when I know the voice of the narrator always grates at me. I almost always buy a print copy of his books because I want to highlight or reread the book.

Like many of Smith's books, this is a book that I think will benefit from a second (or third reading), not because it is a challenging read but because Smith is dealing with modes of thought, not just ideas. Modes of thought are not easily changed and require very slow and wide turns. It is more like turning a cargo ship than spinning on roller skates.