Makers & Mystics Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark: Contemporary Art and The Path of the Mystics with James K. A. Smith
May 12, 2026
James K. A. Smith, philosopher and author of Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, shares how personal crisis led him from intellectualism into mystical unknowing. He explores mysticism as surrender, the spiritual power of difficult contemporary art, and how art trains attention and prepares communities to dwell with mystery.
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Depression Led To A Mystical Doorway
- James K. A. Smith discovered mysticism during a severe depressive season when his wife brought home a battered copy of St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul.
- Reading St. John and Thomas Merton described his aridity and abandonment back to him, giving permission to see those states as a portal rather than endpoint.
Make Friends With Not Knowing
- Befriending failure and mystery is central to mystical practice; unknowing becomes a space to 'surf' rather than a deficit to fix.
- Smith reframed the dark night as pilgrimage and discipline, turning aridity into a spiraling path rather than a single ecstatic event.
Faith As Knowing By Belovedness
- Smith distinguishes belief-as-propositions from mystical faith as a non-discursive mode of knowing where the fundamental experience is 'I am beloved.'
- Mystical testimony uses poetic, oblique language to cultivate an embodied awareness love-seeped into the bones rather than propositional assent.
