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

"Big gifts often come in small packages--sometimes even a plain cardboard box. Tish Harrison Warren has a talent for unpacking these gifts that God has placed all around us."

Michael Horton, professor of theology, Westminster Seminary California, author of Ordinary

"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 tiesmaking 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."

Barbara Mahany, the Chicago Tribune, February 28, 2017

"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."

Katelyn Beaty, print managing editor, Christianity Today

"In this moment in culture, when much feels complicated and shallow, Tish Harrison Warren offers a beautiful and life-giving narrative: a way toward the ordinary sacred. This book is gentle in its simplicity and rich in wisdom. I wish I had read it a decade ago."

Micha Boyett, author of Found

"Sometimes the difference between drudgery and epiphany is just seeing things from the right angle, a frame that reframes everything, even the mundane. This marvelous little book is that certain slant of light that illuminates the everyday as an arena of sanctification, where the Spirit makes us holy in ways we might miss. You don't need more to do in a day, Warren shows. Instead, reframe the everyday as an extension of worship, and folding the laundry, washing dishes, and even commuting become habitations of the Spirit."

James K. A. Smith, author of Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love

"Sunday liturgy shapes our faith through its mix of prayers, songs, Scriptures, and sermons. We hear from and are shaped by God through these practices. Under Tish Harrison Warren's insightful gaze, our seemingly 'boring' daily routines become a liturgy of their own--calling us to confession and community, Scripture and Sabbath, baptism and embodiment. Some spiritual directors listen for God's invitations in our prayers. Tish discerns God's invitations in our everyday life. She reminds us thatGod intends to speak, to invite, and to transform us in every situation we find ourselves in. Tish confronts us with the reality that God will not be confined to 1.5 hours on a Sunday. She is the prophet and pastor that our churches desperately need. At least this harried working dad needs her voice. I am approaching the daily routines of housework and homemaking with my wife and kids with newfound expectation and hope."

Gregory Jao, vice president director of campus engagement, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

"This beautiful book will brush the dust from your dingy days and reveal the extraordinary that is to be found in the ordinary. No mundane daily task will be the same once these pages open your eyes to how the work of your hands reflects the ways of the Creator and the rhythms of eternity."

Karen Swallow Prior, author of Booked and Fierce Convictions

"Tish Harrison Warren is both a priest and a mother who changes poopy diapers. She embodies the high calling of the church and the high calling of the home and in those dual vocations has written a book of tremendous importance. Tish writes with candor, insight, and intelligence about the sacredness of quotidian living. The highest compliment I can offer is that her book inspired me to go back to my dirty sink and my screaming kids with a renewed sense of purpose."

Andrea Palpant Dilley, contributing editor, Christianity Today

"Tish Harrison Warren shows us what it looks like to be shaped and formed, in a book as down-to-earth and inviting as it is wise. I don't know of any book that's more winsome in commending a life lived in sync with the church calendar."

Wesley Hill, assistant professor of biblical studies, Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, Pennsylvania

"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.'"

Jamie A.Hughes, Christianity Today, December 2016

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. His books include The Tech-Wise Family, Playing God, and Strong and Weak.

Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She writes a weekly newsletter for the New York Times and is a columnist for Christianity Today. She is also the author of Prayer in the Night andLiturgy of the Ordinary. She lives with her husband, Jonathan, and their three children in the Austin, Texas, area.