An extended review of a 2026 book by James K. A. Smith
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Yale University Press, 2026. 256 pages. $26 (ebook $39)
James K.A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich., was born in Ontario's Oxford County and completed degrees at the University of Waterloo and the Institute for Christian Studies, among several others. Though as a younger man Smith believed that "philosophy and religion were fundamentally about truth, about getting it right," depression made him confront the limitations of the academic disciplines and religious beliefs which had once supplied his sense of security.
It was poetry that showed Smith how to bear uncertainty. Approached contemplatively, the arts refuse simple interpretations and easy answers, "hold[ing] together contradictions that discursive rationality disallows."
In the age of smartphones and social media we have the opportunity to be satisfied by almost any answer we want, and "being seen winning the argument is even more important than validity or truth." But in aesthetic experience, there is no argument to win. For Smith, it is "in the contemplative spaces of the gallery and the cinema that I have let go of conceptual analysis and learned how to receive, how to rest, how to refuse the commodification of attention."
He does not consider distraction a new phenomenon, but "the age in which we find ourselves ... has its own forms of distraction that are novel and acute" which make it more challenging "to quell distraction and get to the quiet of an untroubled mind that is ripe to receive." The untroubled mind is not one without care or worry, but one which can accept not knowing: what a painting means, what others think of us, what the future holds.
Smith posits that the value of quiet contemplation, the ability to mentally withdraw from the overwhelming demands of the world on one's consciousness, is not located only in the ability to enjoy the avant-garde, but in spiritual discipline. The main "wager" of Smith's book "is that the modes of attention and contemplation that characterize 'the aesthetic mindset' are analogous to the spiritual itinerary of contemplation that we find in ancient desert dwellers, medieval mystics, and twentieth-century sages." The book explores what mystics like Teresa of Ávila, Thomas Merton, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing had to say about solitude, withdrawal and contemplation.
Smith also draws on philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, suggesting that to encounter and contemplate transcendence is "to be confronted with an Otherness in a way that eludes 'relation,' insofar as I cannot comprehend or categorize the other." As we are confronted by that which we can't know, or which unsettles us, we are tempted to use our so-called logic or rationality to settle things for ourselves. Smith posits, in the company of the mystics, that there are new kinds of spiritual peace and delight to be found in the practice of quiet contemplation, the fruit of which is the ability to simply receive what is before us, without reducing the unknowable to the known.
Smith's purpose is profound and admirable. This is the work of someone open about his failures to find the answers he wanted, but who has come to know peace and comfort in the unknowing. He is at a formal disadvantage, using academic style to disclaim the promises of rational discourse, but overcomes this by maintaining a humble, non-argumentative posture throughout. His challenge to readers is indirect, taking aim not at specific beliefs but at our motivating need for certainty and the ways it blinds us to the world. He focuses on his own journey of maturing from his need for certainty with the help of the mystics, rather than taking aim at particular certainties or the harms they can bring. It is only in the epilogue that he references the pressure that a Christian might feel towards certainty, "the dogmatism of both my youth and my co-religionists." It is to the book's credit and integrity that this dogmatism is not a focus of Smith's discourse; it is sufficient to leave it unwritten.
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