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James K. A. Smith

James K.A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he also teaches in the department of congregational and ministry studies.

Articles by this author:

  • Singing the Story Into Our Bones

    By James K. A. Smith
    June 2013

    Cultural forces can sometimes affect how we “see” the Bible, how we approach the Scriptures. So we receive the Bible as a sort of divine encyclopedia full of revealed “facts,” or we treat it as an abstract rule book, or we revere it as merely a historic relic of a past when people seemed to actually encounter God. What gets lost in these functional “pictures” of the Bible is something central to the Scriptures themselves: the fact that the Bible is a story. God reveals himself to us in a narrative.

  • Sanctification for Ordinary Life

    By James K. A. Smith
    March 2012

    There are many different ways to tell the story of the Protestant Reformation. A favorite centers on the heroic tale of Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk newly convicted by his discovery of Paul’s forensic
    gospel, furiously hammering his ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. The Reformation is thus launched by a kind of medieval blog post about justification by faith that becomes the catalyst for a theological