About the Book A popular speaker and award-winning author helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. Book Synopsis Christianity Today Book Award Winner Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Center Book Award You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the imagination station that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship. Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom , Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that books content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smiths popular presentations on the ideas in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life. From the Back Cover You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. Who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. We may not realize, however, the ways our hearts are taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. In You Are What You Love , popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith helps us recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. A user-friendly introduction to the sweeping Augustinian insight that we are shaped most by what we love most, more so than by what we think or do. If sin and virtue are disordered and rightly ordered love, respectively, and if the only way to change is to change what we worship, then this will lead us to rethink how we conduct Christian work and ministry. Jamie gives some foundational ideas on how this affects our corporate worship, our Christian education and formation, and our vocations in the world. An important, provocative volume! -- Tim Keller , Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City What do you love? is the most important question of our lives. With his characteristic ease, energy, and insightfulness, Smith explores in this compelling book not only what it is that we should love but also how we can learn to love what we should. -- Miroslav Volf , Yale Divinity School; author of A Public Faith and Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World In this wise and provocative book, Jamie Smith has the audacity to ask the question: Do we love what we think we love? It is not a comfortable question if we strive to answer it honestly. Smith presses us to do so and then shows us the renewed and abundant life that awaits Christians whose habits and practices--whose liturgies of living--work to open our hearts to our God and our neighbors. -- Alan Jacobs , Honors College, Baylor University Desiring the Kingdom influenced me more than any single book of the past decade. I--and the rest of the church--owe a great debt to Smiths scholarship, now made particularly accessible in You Are What You Love. As a means for reimagining the task of discipleship, this book should be required reading for every pastor, lay leader, and parent. -- Jen Pollock Michel , author of Christianity Today s 2015 Book of the Year, Teach Us to Want About the Author James K. A. Smith (PhD, Villanova University) is professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he also holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. He is the editor of Comment magazine. Smith has authored or edited many books, including Imagining the Kingdom , Whos Afraid of Relativism? , and the Christianity Today Book Award winners Desiring the Kingdom (over 30,000 copies sold) and Whos Afraid of Postmodernism? He is also editor of the well-received The Church and Postmodern Culture series.