Adam S. Miller

Professor of Philosophy Adam S Miller

"You won't like this book. Ecclesiastes is gloomy, skeptical, and irreverent. It is caustic and drolly splenetic. It is unapologetically human. It refuses to abet our hunger for clean narratives and happy endings. It is a hopeless book. Insisting on life's futility, the world's capriciousness, and God's inscrutability, it deliberately cultivates despair. It sees such bone-deep hopelessness as the only cure for what ails us. Ecclesiastes is a hard book full of hard sayings. It is an anvil against which our hearts must be hammered. No wonder we avoid it. But the cost of avoidance is high. As Paul insists, in order to become Christian, we must first learn to be hopeless. Hopelessness is the door to Zion. Hopelessness is crucial to a consecrated life. Before we can find hope in Christ, we must give up hope in everything else." In "Nothing New Under the Sun," Adam S. Miller provides a sharp, contemporary paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, continuing to work in the same vein as the popular "Grace is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans" (2015).

A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes

Nothing New Under the Sun

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.

An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans

Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan

Life in Christ Before You Die

An Early Resurrection

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 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.

Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace

Letters to a Young Mormon, Second Edition

Reflections on what it means to practice theology as a modern Mormon scholar. Author stakes out his positions on the nature of the Atonement, the soul, testimony, eternal marriage, contemporary politics, humanism, and the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

Essays in Mormon Theology

Rube Goldberg Machines

An eye-opening journey into America's past. Documents how much of the "history" that Americans have been taught in public and private schools and promoted in establishment history texts is at the least, distorted; at worst, it is myth. Before America became a land of predominantly English Protestants, it was a land explored and settled by Irish, Scottish, Spanish, and French Catholics. This work documents that the first known explorers, pioneers, and settlers of America were Catholic. Of the 48 Continental States, Catholics settled first in thirty-three, while Protestants were first in only fifteen. For example: Did you know:-that there were settlements by Catholics in New England before the Pilgrims arrived in 1620?-that Catholics had explored and established settlements in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia before Jamestown was settled in 1607?-that Catholics had celebrated the truly first Thanksgiving feast in America eighty years before the Pilgrims did?

Discovering A Lost Heritage: the Catholic Origins of America

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.

Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

Speculative Grace

This book models an object-oriented approach to grace. It experimentally ports a traditional Christian understanding of grace out of a top-down, theistic ontology and into a bottom-up, agent-based ontology. A systematic account of Bruno Latour's experimental, agent-based approach to metaphysics sets the object-oriented stage.

Adam S. Miller

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