James Faulconer - On Religious Expectations

When our religion ceases to challenge our ordinary expectations, either we have reached perfection or it has lost its power for us.

-James Faulconer, "Challenging Expectations," Speaking Silence

James Faulconer - On Alleviating Suffering

It is easier to give when we see pictures of disaster or when our heartstrings are tugged by someone forlorn. It is easy to understand the psychology of our reaction: seeing pain or suffering we want to alleviate it, and the closer the person suffering is to us, either spatially or in a relationship, the more our desire to help. But understanding why we are more prone to help our own doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to also help those who are not ours.

There are always people in need. We cannot escape our obligation to help them, even when we do not know who or where they are, or why they suffer. If we have received God's grace, we must share it. Not to share it would be to receive it ungratefully.

James Faulconer, "What Can I Do?", Speaking Silence

James Faulconer - Suffering With God

Paul tells us that life in the Spirit results in becoming part of the family of God, joint heirs with his Son. He says, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Rom. 8:16-17).

The glory of the divine inheritance provided to the disciple of Jesus Christ is wondrous, but the condition put on that bequest is puzzling: "if so be that we suffer with him." Divine glory requires not only the divine suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. It also requires our suffering with the Son.

The Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, tells us why the Lord suffered: "I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent" (D&C 19:16). Yet it responds to our demand for an explanation of our suffering, not with a method for escaping suffering or a claim that we do not really suffer, but with this rhetorical question: "The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122:8). If even God himself, the Son of God, cannot escape suffering, how should we expect to do so?

God weeps at our pain and our death. He also, and probably more so, weeps at our sinfulness.
Enoch's response to God's sorrow—the way in which he becomes like God—is to weep like God.

To be like God is to suffer with him on the behalf of others. It is not to weep only with those who weep because they have been wounded (Mosiah 18:9), though that is essential. It also is to weep, as God does in Enoch's vision, for those who wound. It is to take responsibility for the sinner as well as the sinned-against.

Divine power is the power to feel pain with and for others, the power to feel pain and sorrow. To be in the family of God is to accept suffering as Jesus did. It is to respond to God's suffering as Enoch did. We too must stretch forth our arms. Our hearts too must swell wide as eternity. Our bowels also must yearn until eternity shakes. Like Enoch, like God, we must weep for humankind.
Only if we stretch and swell and yearn and weep as God does can we do what those who suffer need. Our righteousness requires our suffering. The redemption of anyone or everyone, whether temporal or spiritual redemption, requires our weeping.

-James Faulconer, "Suffer With Him", Speaking Silence.

Adam S. Miller - Religious Transformation.

The point of religion is to wake up.  "The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin" (WS 437). 

On Latour's account, the test for religious competence is clear.  "If, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talk tries to involve you in" (TF 32).  Religion has no interest in selling you insurance or in telling you something you don't already know.  It does not want to teach you or inform you.  Religion wants to change you.  It wants to render you sensitive to the passing worlds alrady hard upon you.  "Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another" and religion is about the latter, not the former (TF 29).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 156

Adam S. Miller - The Art of Losing

Subjects, whatever the limitations imposed upon them, can have their constraints transubstantiated into grace and liberation.  This is the message of the cross: redemption unfolds as the practice--as the art--of losing.  The cross is that most intimate detour to salvation.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 150

Adam S. Miller - Religion and the Two Faces of Grace

Religion corrects for our farsightedness.  It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen.  To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness.  Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace.  Redemption turns on this revelation. 
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces.  On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance.  On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility.  Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance.  Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
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The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32).  Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects.  Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace.  To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32).  Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside.  Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional.  Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace.  In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely.  But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39).  Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable.  "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
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...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced.  Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction.  It is a little bit subtle and requires great care.  Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending.  It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145

Adam S. Miller - Pluralistic Religion

In the same way that religion gets into trouble when it tries to out-science science, science gets into trouble when it tries to out-religion religion.  This is particularly true when science apes the confused, traditional view of religion as something that is all things to all people, a mixture of everything, and the final word on all of it.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 136

Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism

Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction.  Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.

If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand.  If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness.  "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228).  There are nothing but translations all the way down.  If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live.  It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again.  Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism.  When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232).  Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.

"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"

The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things.  Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again.  God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor.  The path beat by their feet marks the way.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135

Adam S. Miller - God Suffers Grace

The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendent God who created the world out of nothing...God, if he does or will exist, is an object, one among many, who suffers the grace of resistant availability like the objects that compose him.

Adam S. Miller - Religious Expectations Revealed

To expect a modest arrangement of people and frescoes and bread and hard wooden pews to do what the Hubble telescope does and lay down a through-line to deep space is to court pretty certain disappointment.  But to think that a modest arrangement of these objects has no disclosive power is to miss religious phenomena altogether.  Religious practices do not, like scientific practices, send us far away.  Religious practices work in the opposite direction: they ratchet us down and in.  They display the invisible grace of what was already available.  Saying a prayer isn't like flying off to an exotic locale, it's like squishing your toes down through layers of mud.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 131

Adam S. Miller - Religion is not about "Belief"

Religion aims at illuminating objects that are too near rather than too far.  Religion is the work of making-present what is already available.  Religious narratives, rather than conveying us to some distant place, are meant to enact the nearness of what is already given. Enacting this nearness is the key to redeeming the present and unveiling grace. "The truth-value of those stories depends on us tonight, exactly as the whole  history of two lovers depends on their ability to re-enact the injunction to love again in the minute the are reaching for one another in the darker moment of their estrangement" (TF 33).
...
Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant,  invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action" (TS 231).  Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available.  Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence.  Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but "faith and belief have nothing so say to one another." (TS 231).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 126-127

Adam S. Miller - Science and Religion

For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria--but these magisteria are anything but "non-overlapping" and, more critically, Latour finds their commonly assigned division of labor laughable.  "What a comedy of errors!  When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous soul-lifting, uplifting.  And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy" (TF 36).  It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference.  It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent.  It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.

But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility.  The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains.  This invisibility,while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach. "The far away is just as foreign, just as difficult to reach, just as unrealistic, and I would add just as unreasonable as the nearby" (WS 465).  Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, and accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.

On Latour's telling, though the analogy is mine, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes like this:  To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena.  However, full of its own success and egged on by religious pretensions, science can't help but draw some unflattering conclusions about its neighbors.  Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our far-sightedness), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless.  Seen through these lenses, all of science's hard-earned, transcendent objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether.  

The mistaken assumption that commonly follows--for many religious people and scientists alike--is that religious talk, because it doesn't address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to "an invisible world of belief" that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating (HI 433).  As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and many religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice--knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus--to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd.  "Belief," claims Latour in response, "is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science" (TF 45).  both of these caricatures need to be abandoned.  Science doesn't deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs and "the fights, reconciliations, ceasefire, between these two 'worldviews'are as instructive as a boxing match in a pitch black tunnel" (WS 464).

...

The same competencies needed to be good at science are those needed to be good at religion.  The practitioner needs patience, modesty, persistence, curiosity, concentration, generosity, creativity, rigor, care, and of course, and objective bent.  As commonly understood, neither knowledge nor belief describes the work of science or religion.  Both science and religion require the same compentencies and both science and religion produce the same output.  Both induce revelation.  However, where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 119-122

Adam S. Miller - Religion and Science, correcting two kinds of invisibility

Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear.  Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility.  In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent.  In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent.  Science and religion differ in that they address two different kinds of invisibility.  Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects, religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena.  Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable.  Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.  Science corrects for our nearsightedness, religion for our farsightedness.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 119

Adam S. Miller - Ontology & Hermeneutics, no original meaning to recover

The need for interpretation and translation is not the mark of a fallen world, it is the substance of life.  To live is to interpret.  This can be hard to swallow.  "When you speak of hermeneutics, no matter which precaution you take, you always expect the second shoe to drop: someone inevitably will add: 'But of course there also exist "natural," "objective" things that are "not" interpreted'" (RS 144-145).  But no--there are, of course, not.  This is not because all natural objects have been contaminated by the interpretive meddling of other objects.
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There is no original meaning to recover.  There are only objects to be persuaded. The more, the better.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 108

Adam S. Miller - Truth is the product of a mundane democracy

In a metaphysical democracy, every object gets a vote. Producing statements that only some humans find persuasive won't get you very far. If you want to speak truthfully about icebergs, then it is not enough to convince your fellow scientists, some influential politicians, or even a bevy of soccer moms. To have real traction you must also convince the icebergs themselves to line up behind what you say. If you want to make claims about honey, your alignment will have to queue not just bee-keepers, but flowers and hives and bees as well. The more bees that agree, the more substantial your claim becomes. When it comes to truth, appeals to authority carry only as much weight as the masses that such authority can muster. Blanket appeals to truths sponsored by absent gods, angels, Platonic forms, natural laws, or noumenal things-in-themselves have no force...Truth is the product of a mundane democracy, not the province of a magic kingdom. In order to vote, you have to show up at the polling place.
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Truth is a function of both popularity and durability.  If a truth hits it off with a persuasive mass of humans and (in particular) nonhumans and then manages to get itself copied and repeated, ti has a career on its hands.  Truths "are much like genes that cannot survive if they do not manage to pass themselves on to later bodies" (SA 38).  Claims that are not persuasive to humans and nonhumans alike will quickly die out.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 103-104