Books

Machines for Making Gods follows Mormon transhumanists who bring religious aspirations into conversation with technological speculation. For these interlocutors, ideas about divinization, resurrection, and worlds without end open questions about what human beings might become—and what they should do now. The book attends to the making, circulation, and interpretation of speculative texts, through which possible futures acquire a place in present social life. Its concern is not simply whether a prediction will come true. It asks how imagining a future can organize commitments, remake religious possibilities, and give people reasons to act. Where miraculous surprise can change the will, speculation offers a different relation to novelty: an effort to will something new into existence.

A Diagram for Fire is an ethnography of the Vineyard, an American charismatic Christian movement. It follows miracles through prayer, worship, and everyday life to ask how religious experience can be both surprising and recognizable. Rather than treating the miracle as an isolated break with ordinary life, the book examines the relations through which novelty is produced, discerned, and given order. Those relations help explain variation within the Vineyard and its connections with other forms of Christianity. Surprise matters because an event that exceeds a person’s expectations or will can be understood as arriving from outside the self. The question is how such experiences become consequential: how they reshape agency, religious practice, and the possibilities of a shared world.