Liturgy of the Ordinary - by Tish Harrison Warren (Hardcover)

About the Book

Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something author Tish Harrison Warren does in a day--making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys--and relates it to spiritual practice as well as to our Sunday worship.

Book Synopsis

Christianity Today Book of the Year

Over 200,000 Copies Sold!

Discover the Holiness of Your Everyday

What if the overlooked routines of your day became sacred invitations?Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren is a gentle reminder that God's presence is not just in the extraordinary but in the midst of the ordinary. Through the lens of her own daily life, Warren invites you to find holiness in the mundane and recognize how seemingly small, daily habits shape your spiritual growth.

Framed around one typical day, this book explores life through the lens of liturgy--small practices and habits that form us. In each chapter, Warren considers a common daily experience like making the bed, brushing her teeth, and losing her keys. Drawing from the diversity of her life as a campus minister, Anglican priest, friend, wife, and mother, Warren opens up a practical theology of the everyday.

Key Features:

• Transform the Everyday: Learn simple habits that foster a deeper awareness of the sacred in everyday routines.
• Discussion and Reflection: Explore thought-provoking questions and practices designed for personal growth and group engagement.
• Connection to Worship: Discover activities that relate both to spiritual practices as well as to an aspect of Sunday worship.

"Warren shows readers how to turn the mundane and often frustrating aspects of daily life into a reflection on the sacred. Working her way through a typical day--her morning routine, busywork such as checking email, fights with her spouse--Warren seamlessly blends together lived realities with theological reflections. Her writing is lyrical and often humorous, and she has a gift for making theological concepts seem easy to understand and (perhaps most importantly) easy to live. ... But she reminds readers that while they 'can get drunk on talk of justification, ecclesiology, pneumatology, Christology, and eschatology... these big ideas are borne out--lived, believed, and enfleshed--in the small moments of our day, in the places, seasons, homes, and communities that compose our lives.'" - Publishers Weekly Starred Review, December 2019

Review Quotes

"From the photograph of a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich on the cover, Tish Harrison Warren's debut work, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, signals that it's rooted in the quotidian, the humble humdrum of day-after-day existence. This is spiritual guidance for the bed-maker, the teeth-brusher, the traffic-snarled among us. This is one ordinary day turned inside out, its hallowed script revealed, liturgical underpinnings exposed. . . . She beautifully ties making the bed to the Creation story, to God's making beauty from chaos. . . . It's the nitty-gritty of daily work where Warren illuminates holiness. She writes of 'tiny theophanies, ' church-bell moments, that jolt her--and us, her readers--to sacred attention. The purity of her vision, the clarity of her writing, makes effortless work of the notion that the small acts of our everydays are what shape us into the sacred vessels we are meant to be."

"If Christianity is to retain its witness in our frenetic and fragmented age, it must take root not only in the thoughts and emotions but also in the daily lives and even bodies of those who call Christ Lord. Tish Harrison Warren has beautifully 'enfleshed' the concepts and doctrines of our faith into quotidian moments, showing how every hour of each day can become an occasion of grace and renewal. If you want to know how faith matters amid messy kitchens, unfinished manuscripts, marital spats, and unmade beds, Liturgy of the Ordinary will train your eyes to see holy beauty all around."

"Warren's message flies in the face of our culture's love of distraction and pursuit of extreme sensation. We would do well to slow down for a bit and hear her out. . . . Liturgy of the Ordinary isn't the first book written in praise of prosaic moments, and Warren's isn't the first voice to counsel slowing down. But Warren admirably explores these themes from both a theological and practical perspective. Her words can help us grasp what my grandfather learned through a lifetime of commonsense faith--and a lot of sweeping: The 'new life into which we're being baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.'"

About the Author

Andy Crouch (MDiv, Boston University School of Theology) is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, an organization that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship, and he is the author of The Tech-Wise Family, Strong and Weak, Playing God, and Culture Making. For more than ten years he was an editor and producer at Christianity Today, including serving as executive editor from 2012 to 2016.

Tish Harrison Warren is a weekly contributing newsletter writer for the New York Times and writes a monthly column for Christianity Today. She is a writer-in-residence at Resurrection Anglican Church in Austin, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, and previously served in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of Prayer in the Night.