The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ
By James Bryan Smith
Intervarsity Press / 2010 / 264 pages

According to Dr. Smith, we have bought into false notions of happiness and success.  It is these false notions that lead us down the pathways into vices such as lying, anger, lust and judging.

The Good and Beautiful Life follows the Sermon on the Mount guiding us to replace our false beliefs with Jesus’ description of life in the Kingdom of God.

The book is divided into twelve chapters such as Learning to Live Without Anger and Learning to Live Without Worry and Living in the Kingdom Day by Day.  As Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline says, “Dr. Smith has thought long and hard about the process of human transformation into the likeness of Jesus.”

The book begins with the following:  I have never met a person whose goal was to ruin his or her life.  We all want to be happy, and we want it all of the time.

What follows is a course in learning to live the way Jesus taught us to live.  It is the result of a desire to create a “Curriculum for Christlikeness”.

- by Gail MacGillivray

About the Author:

James Bryan Smith is a theology professor at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, as well as the director of the Christian Spiritual Formation Institute there.  A writer and speaker in the area of Christian Spiritual formation, Jim Smith is a founding board member Renovare.  Smith is an ordained United Methodist Church minister and has served in various capacities in local churches.  He is also the author of A Spiritual Formation Workbook, Devotional Classics (with Richard Foster), Embracing the Love of God, Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven and Room of Marvels.