Speculative Grace

Speculative Grace
Author: Adam S. Miller
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2013-06-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823251500

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.

Speculative Grace

Speculative Grace
Author: Adam S. Miller
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 082325223X

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.

The Death and Life of Speculative Theology

The Death and Life of Speculative Theology
Author: Ryan Hemmer
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2023
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1978715285

Drawing on the thought of Bernard Lonergan, The Death and Life of Speculative Theology narrates the rise and fall of speculative theology, retrieves and transposes its central achievements, and shows how it might be renewed as a modern science for a modern culture.

Speculative Fictions

Speculative Fictions
Author: Herb Wyile
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2002-02-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773569898

Herb Wyile provides a comparative analysis of the historical concerns and textual strategies of twenty novels published since the appearance of Rudy Wiebe's groundbreaking The Temptations of Big Bear in 1973. Drawing on the work of theorists and critics such as Hayden White, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and Michel De Certeau, Speculative Fictions examines the nature of these novels' engagement with Canadian history, historiography, and the writing of historical fiction. In the 1970s and early 1980s, writers such as Wiebe, Joy Kogawa, and Timothy Findley set the stage for a predominantly postcolonial and postmodern interrogation of traditional conceptions of Canadian history, the writing of history and fiction, and the idea of nation. Through his comparative approach, Wyile emphasizes the ways in which this spirit has been sustained in more recent historical novels by Jane Urquhart, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Tom Wharton, Margaret Atwood, and others. He concludes that the writing of history in English-Canadian fiction over the last thirty years makes a substantial contribution to a revisioning of history and to a postcolonial renegotiation of Canada and Canadian society as we enter into a new century.

The Ambiguity of Being

The Ambiguity of Being
Author: Jonathan R. Heaps
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2024-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0813238048

The debate in Catholic theology over the relationship between the natural and the supernatural has only occasionally engaged with Bernard Lonergan's philosophical and theological contributions on the topic. The Ambiguity of Being argues that more detailed engagement with Lonergan's work implies an oversight in both the 20th- and 21st-century debates. Ambiguity argues the controversy has failed to notice how the problem of the natural and the supernatural is, in fact, two problems. Ambiguity takes both problems in their widest sense to be about action?both divine and human. The first problem asks how God can act in human action. A question for Christians at least since St. Augustine faced the Pelagian controversy, Lonergan retrieved what he understood to be St. Thomas Aquinas' mature solution. It is a solution gathering together a whole series of theological and philosophical developments into a subtle metaphysical theory of divine and human cooperation. But the recent debates have resituated this problem (and various interpretations of St. Thomas's solution to it) in a modern world with modern concerns about culture and politics for the sake of answering a second, intrinsically related, but really distinct question: what is God doing in human action? Ambiguity finds that the recent controversy almost always finds participants attempting to deduce an answer to the second, modern problem from the medieval, metaphysical Thomist solution to the first. By contrast, Ambiguity argues at length the modern problem cannot be reduced to, nor an answer deduced from its medieval, metaphysical partner because the modern problem of the supernatural?what is God doing in human action??is a hermeneutical problem that calls out for a hermeneutical answer. Ambiguity sketches a heuristic for what a fully adequate answer to this question would require, suggesting a radical re-conception of modern theology's scope.

Sermons and Discourses, 1743-1758

Sermons and Discourses, 1743-1758
Author: Jonathan Edwards
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 813
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300115393

This wide-ranging volume covers the final fifteen of the thirty-three years that Jonathan Edwards preached and includes some of his greatest sermons--including his Farewell Sermons to his Northampton congregation. The period is defined by Edwards' inventive strategies to improvise during the delivery of his sermons. Considering dependence on the written text in the pulpit to be a serious failing, he devised a double-columned, outlined format for his sermon manuscripts and continued to use it for the rest of his life. Sermons from this period also include those preached to Mahican and Mohawk Indians at the mission post of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Edwards' various writings of 1743-58 map the complex terrain of his spiritual, intellectual, and professional life after the Great Awakening. He deals with topics ranging from the spiritual role of youth in the community to the struggles over communion in his Northampton congregation to the war with the French and their Indian allies.