Welcome to episode seventy-six of New Creation Conversations. My guest today is the incredibly gifted writer and Christian philosopher, Dr. James K.A. Smith. I have really been looking forward to having this conversation for a while. Jamie and I became friends about twenty-five years ago when he was a young professor at Loyola-Marymount University, and I was early in my teaching career at Southern Nazarene University. We both got accepted into a summer study program at Calvin College to study “eschatology and hope” with Dr. Miroslav Volf. It was a very enriching summer intellectually and spiritually. However, part of the benefit of the program was that Calvin invited us to bring our families with us for the six weeks we were there. It just happened that Jamie and his wife Deanna, and Deb and I both had four kids all around the same age and so we got to hang out as families.
The group that summer had several very gifted and bright people in it, but it didn’t take long for us to figure out that Jamie was gifted in unique ways. Eventually Calvin invited him to join their very prestigious philosophy faculty – a faculty that in the past has included names like Richard Mouw, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Jamie now is Professor of Philosophy and the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. In these last two decades Jamie has written some of the most widely read and greatly influential books of this generation. We will talk about several of them in our conversation, but some of the best known are Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; How (Not) to Be Secular (CT winner); the award-winning Desiring the Kingdom (CT winner); You are What You Love, and more recently On the Road with St. Augustine (CT winner). He’s also written for the Wall Street Journal, the nY Times, The Washington Post, USA Today… well, you get the point.
Jamie has an amazing story of both coming to faith in Christ and becoming a scholar – which he I got him to tell pieces of in our conversation. He’s a graduate of the University of Waterloo. Did his Master’s in Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, and earned his PhD in Philosophy from Villanova University.
A lot of our conversation centers on his brand-new book, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Brazos Press). It is exactly what you would expect from Jamie, a rich, thoughtful, well-written, and transformational text
Jamie makes a very short list of four or five people who have shaped my own journey and my thinking the most, it’s fun that I also get to call him a friend. Thanks for listening in to this New Creation Conversation. Here’s my conversation with Dr. James K.A. Smith.
