Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"The rapidly developing field of object-oriented philosophy has been crying out for significant work on its relation to philosophy of religion. Adam Miller has provided us with a razor-sharp way into this new world. Built around a reading of Bruno Latour's work, this is more than a focused and lucid exposition. It is also a startling, constructive work of theology, in which grace is translated and democratized as the 'resistant availability' of objects and religion's
true work is located in attention to immanence, to ordinariness, to the flesh. Redrawing the boundaries between science and religion, philosophy and theology, this book offers a way beyond humanism without escaping into fantasies of otherworldliness or purity. Provocative and brilliant, Speculative Grace sets an exciting agenda for future philosophical work on the object that is religion."--Steven Shakespeare, Liverpool Hope University
"Adam Miller's book can rightly be described as both a daring experiment in theology, and as a lucid exposition of the thought of the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour. But in being both of these things at once, Speculative Grace is something more: a profound meditation on the cosmos and the multitude of beings that inhabit it. This is a book that stimulates thought, and renews our sense of wonder at what William James called the 'buzzing, blooming confusion' of the world."--Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University
About the Author
Adam S. Miller is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Levi R. Bryant
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Porting Grace
3. Grace
4. Conspiracy Theories
5. An Experimental Metaphysics
6. Proliferation
7. A Metaphysical Democracy
8. Methodology
9. A Flat Ontology
10. Local Construction
11. The Road to Damascus
12. The Principle of Irreduction
13. Transcendence
14. Dislocated Grace
15. Resistant Availability
16. Agency
17. Translation
18. Representation
19. Epistemology
20. Constructivism
21. Suffering
22. Black Boxes
23. Substances
24. Essences
25. Forms
26. Subjects
27. Reference
28. Truth
29. Hermeneutics
30. Laboratories
31. Science and Religion
32. Belief
33. Iconophilia
34. God
35. Evolution
36. Morals
37. The Two Faces of Grace
38. Spirit
39. Prayer
40. Presence
41. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index