Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

This book offers a novel account of grace framed in terms of Bruno Latour’s “principle of irreduction.” It thus models an object-oriented approach to grace, experimentally moving a traditional Christian understanding of grace out of a top-down, theistic ontology and into an agent-based, object-oriented ontology. In the process, it also provides a systematic and original account of Latour’s overall project.
The account of grace offered here redistributes the tasks assigned to science and religion. Where now the work of science is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant, and too transcendent to be visible, the business of religion is to bring into focus objects that are too near, too available, and too immanent to be visible. Where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our nearsightedness, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our farsightedness. Speculative Grace remaps the meaning of grace and examines the kinds of religious instruments and practices that, as a result, take center stage.

Politics & Social Sciences

Miller, Adam S.

Philosophy

Fordham University Press

This book offers a novel account of grace framed in terms of Bruno Latour’s “principle of irreduction.” It thus models an object-oriented approach to grace, experimentally moving a traditional Christian understanding of grace out of a top-down, theistic ontology and into an agent-based, object-oriented ontology. In the process, it also provides a systematic and original account of Latour’s overall project. The account of grace offered here redistributes the tasks assigned to science and religion. Where now the work of science is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant, and too transcendent to be visible, the business of religion is to bring into focus objects that are too near, too available, and too immanent to be visible. Where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our nearsightedness, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our farsightedness. Speculative Grace remaps the meaning of grace and examines the kinds of religious instruments and practices that, as a result, take center stage.

Badiou, Marion and St Paul addresses the difficult question of whether it is possible to coherently think the notion of grace strictly in terms of immanence. The book develops a model for the thought of an immanent grace that avoids the traps of both obscurantism (the invocation of a wholly ineffably or transcendent ground for grace) and banality (the reduction of grace to nothing more than a variation of the established order). The conceptual resources needed for the development of such a model are gathered from sustained and original readings of St Paul's letter to the Romans, Jean-Luc Marion's Being Given and Alain Badiou's Being and Event.  As each thinker is taken up, their unique contributions to the model are elaborated and their positions are coordinated with each of the others in order to render a comparative evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses possible. The result of this triangulation is the emergence of a common conceptual strategy that simultaneously opens surprisingly direct paths into the heart of each of their disparate projects and, more importantly, a viable route to the thought of a genuinely immanent grace.

Badiou, Marion and St Paul: Immanent Grace (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy, 20)

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Continuum

O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you!\nFrom the moment Sariah and Lehi s family arrived in the promised land, their prophets warned that the people would face destruction if they failed to trust in Christ. Centuries later, Mormon witnesses the fulfillment of this dark prophecy. He witnesses his own people hewn down in open rebellion against God. Crying out from the depths of his heart, the prophet reflects on what went wrong and how it might have been avoided. Through it all, hope in Christ abides. 
,br> In this brief theological introduction, philosopher and theologian Adam S. Miller presents Mormon s book as a beginner s guide to the end of the world. Mormon s life is a case study in apocalyptic discipleship. What does a disciple s task of sacrificing all things look like in a world where all things are already passing away? Miller introduces a Mormon for our own troubled times a sober and observant prophet who models hope in Christ even as everything in the world he loves collapses around him.

Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction

Neal a Maxwell Inst

This book is composed as a series of letters. The letters are meant for a young Mormon who is familiar with Mormon life but green in their faith. I imagined myself writing these letters to my own children and struggled, in relation to how we talk about things at church, to say my own piece about what it means to be as a Mormon free, ambitious, repentant, faithful, informed, prayerful, selfless, hungry, chaste, and sealed. The letters do little to benchmark a Mormon orthodoxy. That work belongs to those called to it. Here, my work is personal. I mean only to address the real beauty and real costs of trying to live a Mormon life. And I hope only to show something of what it means to live in a way that refuses to abandon either life or Mormonism.

Letters to a Young Mormon

An Experiment on the Word: Reading Alma 32 is based on a novel idea: that Mormons do theology. Doing theology is different from weighing history, deciding doctrine, or inspiring devotion. Theology speculates. It experiments with questions and advances hypotheses. It tests new angles and pulls loose threads. It reads old texts in careful and creative ways. The Mormon Theology Seminar aims to promote such work. The Seminar is scholarly in orientation and cooperative in practice. It focuses on organizing short-term, seminar-style collaborations that, over the span of a few months of intense discussion, consider specific questions about Mormon theology through close readings of basic Mormon texts. In 2008, six scholars focused on Alma 32. Their papers addressed questions like these: *What does Alma 32 teach us about exercising faith? *What does Alma mean by "the word," and why is it so central to faith? *How can the textual, historical, and political contexts of Alma 32 shape our understanding of Alma's teachings? Their answers will surprise and enlighten you.

An Experiment on the Word: Reading Alma 32

Like Adam Miller's work on Ecclesiastes and Romans, The Sun Has Burned My Skin is a loose paraphrase that aims more for the replication of a certain mood than for the correspondence of particular words and phrases. The songs themselves are a collection of age-old Israelite love songs, searing and intense, sung principally by a young woman who is bold, confident, and only just exposed to the tidal pull of love and sex.

The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon's Song of Songs

By Common Consent Press

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace is the first book to explore key religious themes - from boredom to addiction, and distraction – in the work of one of America's most celebrated contemporary novelists. In a series of short, topic-focussed chapters, the bookjoins a selection of key scenes from Wallace's novels Infinite Jest and The Pale King with clear explanations of how they contribute to his overall account of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. Adam Miller explores how Wallace's work masterfully investigates the nature of first-world boredom and shows, in the process, how easy it is to get addicted to distraction (chemical, electronic, or otherwise). Implicitly critiquing, excising, and repurposing elements of AA's Twelve Step program, Wallace suggests that the practice of prayer (regardless of belief in God), the patient application of attention to things that seem ordinary and boring, and the internalization of clichés may be the antidote to much of what ails us in the 21st century.

Bloomsbury Academic

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace is the first book to explore key religious themes - from boredom to addiction, and distraction – in the work of one of America's most celebrated contemporary novelists.In a series of short, topic-focused chapters, the book joins a selection of key scenes from Wallace's novels Infinite Jest and The Pale King with clear explanations of how they contribute to his overall account of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. Adam Miller explores how Wallace's work masterfully investigates the nature of first-world boredom and shows, in the process, how easy it is to get addicted to distraction (chemical, electronic, or otherwise). Implicitly critiquing, excising, and repurposing elements of AA's Twelve Step program, Wallace suggests that the practice of prayer (regardless of belief in God), the patient application of attention to things that seem ordinary and boring, and the internalization of clichés may be the antidote to much of what ails us in the 21st century.

What follows is not a translation in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s more like a paraphrase. Rather than worry over the letter of the text, the goal has been to illuminate the large scale patterns that structure it. The King James Version, for instance, renders Paul’s letter with uncanny beauty but is opaque as an argument. Modern translations tend to have the same problem. Their overriding concern is with the letter of the text, not with its logic. As a result, Paul’s forest is always getting sacrificed for the sake of his trees. But Paul’s work is too important, his good news too urgent, to leave so much of him locked in the first century. We need our renderings to do more than mimic the original, we need them to bleed and breathe. This work argues that the deep logic of Romans comes into sharp focus around a single premise: Paul’s claim that grace is not God’s backup plan. Paul never quite puts it like this, but he implies it at every turn.

Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans

Religious Studies

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miller, Adam S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Miller, Adam S.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miller, Adam S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Badiou, Marion and St Paul: Immanent Grace (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy, 20)

Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction

Letters to a Young Mormon

An Experiment on the Word: Reading Alma 32

The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon's Song of Songs

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans