My friend Chris Armstrong wrote this the other day:
“Kyle Bennett’s book Practices of Love is wonderful. I wish I had written it. I am reading it with close attention. The biggest thing it has clarified for me so far: a theology of work and vocation MUST be a theology of the disciplined life.”
My first reaction, as an Anglican, was “Well, duh!”
I did go and look up the book, then, and it actually does look quite good: emphasizing the horizontal nature of the spiritual disciplines as a way to guide against spiritual narcissism. There is a vast quantity of reflection on this in the church fathers and in the monastic tradition (I recently had to reread St. Benedict’s Rule for his monks for something and was reminded of this), but if Bennett serves as a gateway to that reflection, that is awesome.
Bodies matter. They matter at work and they matter at play. If we lost our way on that in the Enlightenment, maybe we are beginning to rediscover it now, ironically (or perhaps not so?) in the digital age.)
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