Rube Goldberg Machines Essays In Mormon Theology [Paperback]

Book Description: Doing theology is like building a comically circuitous Rube Goldberg machine: you spend your time tinkering together an unnecessarily complicated, impractical, and ingenious apparatus for doing things that are, in themselves, simple. But there is a kind of joy in theologys gratuity, there is a pleasure in its comedic machination, and ultimatelyif the balloon pops, the hamster spins, the chain pulls, the bucket empties, the pulley lifts, and (voila!) the books page is turnedsome measurable kind of work is accomplished. But this work is a byproduct. The beauty of the machine, like all beauty, is for its own sake. This book is itself a Rube Goldberg machine, pieced together from a variety of essays written over the past ten years. They offer explicit reflections on what it means to practice theology as a modern Mormon scholar and they stake out substantial and original positions on the nature of the atonement, the soul, testimony, eternal marriage, humanism, and the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

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Praise for Rube Goldberg Machines: Adam Miller is the most original and provocative Latter-day Saint theologian practicing today.  Richard Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
Miller is a theologian of the ordinary, thinking about our ordinary beliefs in very non-ordinary ways while never insisting that the ordinary become extra-ordinary.  James Faulconer, Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding, Brigham Young University
Rube Goldberg Machines is one of the best and most important commentaries on the gospel and on life itself that I have ever read.  Thomas F. Rogers, BYU Studies Quarterly
Rube Golberg is a landmark work in the world of Mormon theology.  Kirk Caudle, The Mormon Book Review
A theology of pure immanency is what Adams given us and I can only hope that Mormon theology will never be the same again.  Clark Goble, Mlã‹