There are few contemporary authors that I will pick up just about anything they write. What Jamie Smith has done in How to Inhabit Time is truly phenomenal, demonstrating a really mature and fully orbed work. It is the most personal, and cross-disciplinary project I have read from him. Part memoir, part philosophy, part theology, part biblical studies, part counseling. Perhaps it is the genre breaking nature of the project that makes it so appealing. Personally, this was a profound resource for whole-life reflection. The when question is deeply personal, yet expansive and broad in application. Vocational counselors will especially benefit from the insights here. A read that reads you!

What time is it? I say or think these words daily. I suspect many do. When time is it? This question I have never asked is exactly the one James K.A. Smith invites his readers to consider in How to Inhabit Time. Centered on the idea of temporal dislocation, “being nowhen,” this cross-genre book combines elements of memoir, essayistic nonfiction, divine reading, and Christian self-help into a prescription for the desired yet elusive goal of making the world a better place.

Smith defines “nowhen” as a state of being governed by timeless principles and unchanging convictions, ignoring the past at the cost of the future. The idea of history reverberating in the present, constraining and shaping the possibilities of the future, is not new. Smith discusses various philosophical influences on his thinking, notably Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and also Bouwsma, Nietzsche, Husserl, Hegel, and Hume, as well as poetry, novels, paintings, and contemporary music. These references all point Smith to the concept of spiritual timekeeping, his term for the practice of discernment, of looking to history, individually, collectively, institutionally, to inform both where we are and what we are called to do.

How to Inhabit Time is a challenge to hope in a sacred future abundant in tools for personal growth, pastoral care, counseling, and public service. For example, one of the most provocative insights the book offers is an embracing of ephemerality, an awareness that the fleeting nature of a moment need not translate into melancholy or lament, but rather can deepen appreciation and gratitude. I accepted Smith’s invitation, and performed some of my own spiritual timekeeping. Nearing the end of my child-rearing years, I feel the impending loss of my son’s daily presence as he completes high school and prepares to head off to college. My daughter a few years behind, my season as mother of minor children is drawing to a close. Time with our children as children is ephemeral. While this tempts me to melancholy, spiritual timekeeping points towards appreciation for the years I have lived every day with my children and reflection on the possibilities that history provides for the next season of our relationships. When time is it? Time to savor the fleeting moments with my son and look to an adult relationship grounded in and shaped by our shared history. The intellectual insights and spiritual guidance contained in How to Inhabit Time offer awareness of where we are today and a fresh perspective on what we are called to do tomorrow.

My thoughts:
I truly don't know how to frame my thoughts around this book. Smith put a lot of time, care, and thought into this book. There are moments that seem like highly personal reflections, or a glimpse into philosophy and theology, or just very relevant connections to our lives today. This will be a book I come back to because there is so much wisdom with in its pages. There are also parts of this book that I think will connect to. me in different ways as I enter different seasons of my own life. There were sections that made me reflect deeply, there were parts I was entertained with, and there were also parts that I didn't find as moving. Overall this book was a great chance to think and feel deeply about the subject of time and our place with in it.

Who is this book for:
I think the intended audience is everyone (especially christians). I don't think everyone will enjoy this though. Some may not understand the reflection, some may think it is slow/boring but I do think this book, in the right hands, can help a person reflect, grow, make changes, understand life in new ways. I would recommend at least trying to read it (especially the first and last chapters).

Comments/Questions/Critique:
This book felt like personal essays strung together all with the concept of time as the topic. The only other book I have read that feels this way is "The Anthropocene Reviewed" by John Green. Green's book while being different in content made me reflect and feel very similar to this book

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley

I will read anything James K. A. Smith write. From his more popular works (think You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit) to his more technical (The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology. I really appreciate his ability to write on both levels.

In How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now, Smith writes his first volume in the genre of (what I would consider) wisdom literature. The pace is slower and more reflective than his other works. It also bridges disciplines between philosophy, theology, and even psychology.

The book does not necessarily have a syllogistic flow. One does not get the impression that each chapter is making sustained argument. Rather, each chapter is (by design) an extended meditation on what it means to inhabit time in a particular way. How do engage with our past faithfully? How do we fully engage with our present? How do we engage with our future hopefully?

Smith challenges us to abandon our utopic or apocalyptic futural thinking. He asks us to abandon the shame of our past along with our temptations to nostalgia. He invites us to wrestle with what it means to live in the present. Make no mistake, this is a challenging book if it is read seriously.

It is also a book that I intend to return to and would love to do so in community. In this first read-though, I was hoping to get the general gist of it and provide a review for the books release. I hope, for my next read through, to approach this work more slowly. To discuss it with others. To begin to form the habit of discernment that Smith encourages.

In a moment when so much of our lives are lived in any time BUT the present, this is an important book. May the Church be more faithful to her call as a result of it!

This was a bit of a slow and somewhat challenging read for me. It’s the kind of book that can definitely stretch your intelligence and give you some food for thought. How to Inhabit Time is a good book if you’re newer to reading philosophical works, Smith’s writing is fairly approachable for what it is. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to a newer believer or most lay people because it does take a little bit to understand. Not a bad thing, just something to be mindful of. The book connects well with people who are more artistic, the language is poetic and connects to both your mind and emotions.

James K.A. Smith's newest, How to Inhabit Time, is a lovely meditation on what it means to be a time-bound creature. He contends that many people today, particularly evangelicals, believe they live "nowhen," by which he means they labor under the notion that they are unaffected and unformed by all that has come before them:

Those who imagine they inhabit nowhen imagine themselves wholly governed by timeless principles, unchanging convictions, expressing an idealism that assumes they are wholly governed by eternal ideas untainted by history. They are oblivious to the deposits of history in their own unconscious. They have never considered the archaeological strata in their own souls.

Theologically, this plays itself out in various ways, such as the primitivist Christian who thinks that their faith and practice springs directly from the Bible and thus is more faithful than all those other Christians who cling to tradition. The mistake here, according to Smith, is not a high regard for the authority of Scripture, but a naïveté about how one is shaped by the flow of time whether one knows it or not.

This attention to timeless principles over and against the seasonal timeliness also shapes our present civil discourse. Smith reflects on the civil unrest of 2020 and that peculiarly polarizing phrase, "Black Lives Matter." The assertion is not some kind of timeless proposition, says Smith, but a historically contingent assertion "necessary because of a distinct and particular history of oppression and exploitation, a history that was far from past." Because White Evangelicals reflexively tend to view things through a propositional, timeless lens, their instinct was to retort, "No, all lives matter." The frustration of that discourse stemmed from their inability to read the statement through a time-bound, historically situated lens.

A keen awareness of our own temporal situatedness is also the antidote to overly optimistic views of the future (such as leftist progressivism or rightwing postmillennialism) as well as overly pessimistic views of our own fortunes (will the traumas of life never end?). Time humbles us, because it forces us to reckon with the fact that "everything I'm able to dream and hope and chase in the future is because of what has been bequeathed to me by those who have preceded me." I'm reminded of a recent Jordan Peterson video where he urged churches to call out young men to greatness, as if the call of Scripture was simply that we'd build our own ladders to heaven. Peterson's words likely struck a chord in many young men's hearts, because it appeals to the age-old desire that we might be like God. In contrast, Smith counsels, "There's a difference between believing we are the ones we've been waiting for and realizing the are called to join the Spirit of God coursing through history." When one begins to realize one's place in time, it dispels our delusions of grandeur and allows us to do good in our short day under the sun without having to be written up in the books because of it.

If I had one quibble, it's that How to Inhabit Time reads sometimes like an only loosely connected set of musings and meditations on time, and the side effect is that it can be somewhat difficult to collect my thoughts about it. That's not all bad, though: since I finished it, thoughts about time and my place in it have been soaking in my brain. It leaves some general impressions rather than a pointed instruction about how one ought to inhabit time. Set your expectations accordingly, and enjoy the process!

DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.

Goodness, what a brilliant book. Drawing on philosophy, theology, poetry and stories of his own life, Smith weaves a beautiful companion of a book, inviting his reader to consider time and our place in it. Kairos, chronos, past, present, and future and our relation to each all come into play. This is a deeply comforting and encouraging book that still manages to challenge and provoke deep thought. I'll be recommending it widely.