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

Miller's _Speculative Grace_ is the second of his book-length attempts to (as he put it in his first book, _Immanent Grace_) "traverse theism and atheism for the sake of grace." Here, as he puts it, he argues that "religion works crosswise to theism or atheism." And what he presents is compelling and, especially, beautiful.The book might be divided into four parts. (1) Miller begins with a few introductory chapters outlining his project (chs. 1-3). His intention, he explains, is to "port" the Christian theological notion of grace from a pre-Darwinian to a post-Darwinian metaphysics---in effect, to undertake a strictly *contemporary* thinking of grace. (2) Next, Miller presents a lengthy and most helpful introduction to the thought of Bruno Latour (chs. 4-21). Here his focus is principally on situating grace as the weave of the "resistance" and the "availability" of objects, conceiving of grace as the ubiquitous give and take of material reality. (3) Having outlined Latour's metaphysics and connected it to a grace conceived as fully immanent, Miller next addresses the obscurity of grace, its apparent invisibility (chs. 22-30). Adding a Latourian epistemology to a Latourian ontology, this section works toward a theory of truth that allows for a remarkable reconceptualization of religious practice. (4) Finally, Miller presents his reconceptualization of religious practice (chs. 31-41). Beginning from a careful delineation of science (which deals, ironically, in the transcendent) and religion (which deals, just as ironically, in the immanent), this concluding stretch of the book presents a contemplative practice that, as Miller says, "both is and is not your grandmother's religion": a practice of sitting in pews and listening to cliches, but in a way that allows for a genuine transformation of self.With prose that's a joy to read, _Speculative Grace_ introduces object-oriented thought to religion, and with real force. Levi Bryant describes in his foreword how deeply the book has unsettled him. It's to be expected that it will do the same for many readers---as much for those who think they've understood what it means live religiously as for those who think they've understood what it means to live irreligiously.

I had an intellectual near death experience reading this book . I gave it 5 stars in hopes that enough people will buy it, read it and echo my review that Adam Miller will write a dumbed down version with diagrams and exercises. I think I understood 20% of it and that was worth all the brain pain.

This is easily the most interesting and important book of theology I've read in a very long time. Not only is it inventive, novel, and beautifully written, it is full of insights. It is the kind of theology that needs expression in our scientific age. The medieval theological legacy preoccupied with the three omni's (omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence) has left us with a God that does not speak to our world--one enmeshed in theodicies, thick and intractable. Miller takes an object oriented philosophy (OOP) approach. Drawing on this important new movement within Continental Philosophy to frame his ideas (The movement is starting to draw the gaze of more mainstream philosophy of science), this book makes a significant contribution to a philosophically based theology. In this book, Miller considers the world as given, full of its messiness, and considers the eminence of grace it offers--a grace expressed not as the gift of a transient deity, but as the work and suffering found in the interactions of a universe composed of objects. The book draws heavily on the work of science anthropologist Bruno Latour and uses his thought to provide a springboard for Miller's own ideas--which in my opinion actually transcend and expand on Latour. This is no mere repackaging of Latour but an original reimagining of the implications of Latour's work for a reworking of theology. If the book has a weakness, I think it lies in an undersupply of examples. Because the book is beautifully written, poetic, and metaphor laden, sometimes the obscurity of the style masked the ideas being proposed. I loved the style, because it made me engage with the text at an even deeper level, forcing me to greater openness to the possibilities presented, but sometimes just one or two examples of what he was talking about would have helped ground me in ways I think would be helpful. Overall, I have a feeling that his may be one of the most important theological texts published in a long time and will generate a great deal of excitement and discussion in such circles. What I liked best was that Miller takes both science and religion seriously. His ideas blast both the rising scientistim and the cheap shallowness of the anti-science religionists and offers a rich and vibrant theology that will both challenge and inspire greater theological engagement with modern thought. Don't miss this book. Seriously. It's one of the most important I've seen.

I am in desperate need of the Kindle version. Having a chance to carry it with me everyday, everywhere is a dream come true to me.

I found this book both stimulating and frustrating. The stimulation came from some of the provocative views of Latour that author Adam Miller explicates. But the frustration stems from the fact that most of the presentation is in the abstract, with no examples presented to illustrate the terms and concepts discussed. For instance, we readers could definitely benefit from some real-world examples of what Latour and Miller mean by "grace." Just what sorts of experiences are Latour and Miller trying to get at when they write of grace? I believe there is much more that could be said, and I would hope that Miller will have an opportunity to say it in a future work. Otherwise, his project of explication will be largely frustrated.

Best book I've read ever, well written, easy to understand and quotes some other great philosophers. If your interested in this Guerrilla Metaphysics is also an amazing book

This is a very interesting book, and a pleasure to read. It is very well-written, presents very interesting ideas, and contains a very useful introduction Bruno Latour’s work. So I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It gives an excellent account of Latour's pluralist ontology, one that is far superior, because more faithful, to that given in Graham Harman's book "PRINCE OF NETWORKS: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics". Unfortunately Miller relies too much on Harman's "object-oriented" terminology, which gives a static, passive, and reductionist cast to an ontology that is the very opposite. I am very sympathetic to the book's project of explicating grace in terms of a non-theistic pluralist ontology, and also to the heuristic intermingling of theology (in the widest sense), philosophy, science, the arts etc that this involves.Miller presents his book as an experiment in porting a concept from a theistic plane of monism and transcendence to a speculative and object-oriented plane of pluralism and immanence. This is a very worthwhile project, but I think that Miller is only partially successful. We are all aware of the risks of porting, dramatised in David Cronenberg’s film THE FLY. A scientist develops a working prototype of a porting machine, and tries it out on a human subject, himself. He does not notice that a fly enters with him and though the teleportation is successful he has been reassembled with the fly’s DNA combined with his own. At first all seems well, but then begins his slow transformation into a giant fly-thing. I think something like this happens in the course of Miller’s book.The first two thirds of SPECULATIVE GRACE are truly excellent, and consist in a radical pluralist reading of Bruno Latour’s oeuvre. But beginning with Chapter 31 (the book contains 41 short chapters, mostly 3 or 4 pages long) the tone changes and a very unsatisfying comparison of science and religion is expounded, following Latour’s more recent pronouncements on the different “modes of existence” of science and religion. In a striking rhetorical inversion, science is declared to be concerned with the distant and transcendent, while religion is supposedly an affair of the close and the immanent. This is where I feel that a transcendent framework has been subtly reintroduced. Bruno Latour himself has argued convincingly that questions of “scale” (big and small, macro and micro, and so far and close) are framework dependent (see  Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory , pages 183-186). Miller’s initial re-framing of “grace” in a pluralist non-theistic ontology is here considerably weakened by his resorting to a religion-oriented framing of science and religion where science reveals cold, distant, “transcendent objects” and religion relates us to engaging, close, “immanent objects”. The DNA of ontotheology was surreptitiously ported along with the concept of grace and reaffirms its hegemonic power as the book progresses through its last 40 pages.In fact, the book's whole tendency is Latourian, and not at all "object-oriented", despite Miller's choice of an ontological vocabulary that treats everything as objects. Latour's preferred theoretical terms are "actors" and "networks". He calls his account "actor-network theory", to keep his ontology as open as possible. Miller quotes Latour's slogan "we do not know in advance what the world is made of", but then proceeds to use Graham Harman's all-purpose term of "objects", which does pre-decide on the basic components of the universe. "Actor" is a verbal term, as Latour approaches elements in terms of what they do, and he situates them in "networks" as he considers them also in terms of their relations. Harman's preferred term "objects" is far more static, and he considers objects as "withdrawn" from relations. It is to be regretted that Miller chose to express his Latourian (dynamic, pluralist, relational) theology in the language of Harmanian (static, dualist, withdrawn) ontology.The context into which Miller "ports" the notion of grace , insofar as it is immanent, pluralist, dynamic, and atheological, transforms the meaning and gives it heightened relevance. The interest of this sort of experiment in translation points both ways. It shows that if one is willing to be supple on the doctrine, theological concerns can be translated into more up to date language. Conversely, it shows that seemingly "non-religious" language has spiritual and theological overtones that may go unnoticed without that sort of juxtaposition. On this point Miller's book is an unqualified success. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory