An Event in the Family

This isn’t even a review, just praise in a few lines for some beautiful images as they entangle themselves in language.

I swung by Benchmark Books on my way home from work yesterday and grabbed a couple of books, including Adam Miller’s brief collection of whimsical (hence deeply serious) theology, Rube Goldberg Machines (Kofford Books, just now).

People who know me well know that my view of French philosophy goes something like

French philosophy = hashish + echo chamber – good sense

The young professor Miller (and other wonderful people whom I admire who think highly of Continental philosophy and make beautiful things from it) may one day persuade me to reconsider this visceral antipathy of mine. For now, I think of Miller as an artistic master creating beauty from mostly uninteresting scraps.

In an essay (“The Gospel as an Earthen Vessel”) that experiments with the image of the immanent/transcendent Event (a theme I find much more interesting in the hands of Terry Deacon as absential phenomena and emergent consciousness than in the hands of Alain Badiou and colleagues in la terre du hashish), Miller describes the rich beauties of Mormonism as Event. I was moved particularly by Miller’s placement of the unique Mormon Event in a radical situation of family within the miraculous story of Christ’s love (pp. 82-86), “the Mormon inflection of the event of Christ’s love into the figure of the family.” This is great theology in all the right ways, but you’ll have to read it yourselves to get a taste for its power. Buy the book and read it. Seriously.