[Augustine's] is once again a realist spirituality that is trying to understand how to love what is mortal, how to live amid the ephemeral, how to deal with the crooked timber of our hearts and our penchant to deny all of this and cling to the mortal as if it were immortal.

The question isn't whether you're going to believe, but who; it's not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself to. Do we really think humanity is our best bet? Do we really think we are the the answer to our problems, we who've generated all of them? The problem with everything from Enlightenment scientism to mushy Eat-Pray-Love-ism is us. If anything looks irrational, it's the notion that we are our own best hope.

You can still be living in your childhood bedroom and have departed for a distant country. You can play the role of the “good son” with a heart that roams in a twilight beyond good and evil. You can even show up to church every week with a voracious appetite for idols. Not all prodigals need a passport.

It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly "express" these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. "Doctrines" are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we "understand" when we pray.

James Smith argues that liturgies “are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body.

Whenever science attempts to legitimate itself, it is no longer scientific but narrative, appealing to an orienting myth that is not susceptible to scientific legitimation.

Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.

Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).

Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.

We have created youth ministry that confuses extroversion with faithfulness. We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being 'fired up' for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally.