Fusing speculative realism, analytical and linguistic philosophy this book theorises the fundamental impact the experience of reading has on us. In reading, language provides us with a world and meaning becomes perceptible. We can connect with another subjectivity, another place, another time. At its most extreme, reading changes our understanding of the world around us. Metanoia- meaning literally a change of mind or a conversion-refers to this kind of new way of seeing. To see the world in a new light is to accept that our thinking has been irrevocably transformed. How is that possible? And is it merely an intellectual process without any impact on the world outside our brains? Innovatively tackling these questions, this book mobilizes discussions from linguistics, literary theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. It re-articulates linguistic consciousness by underlining the poetic, creative moment of language and sheds light on the ability of language to transform not only our thinking but the world around us as well.

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.

This is a study of how space and time create objects, and how these objects interact. Using real-world examples, Bryant shows how a networked concept of space and time is at the heart of our central political concerns. What sort of interaction is there between, for example, slow-moving objects like climate and comparatively fast-moving objects like governments? How can they interact with each other given their very different lifespans? How do the Amish interact with the members of the stock market, and vice versa? How do members of congress, who always exist, interact with the temporally discontinuous objects of Congressional sessions that only meet during a certain session each year - flitting in and out of existence? It proposes a new form of social and political analysis - 'onto-cartography' - that looks at how relations between objects are forged by communication and causation. It draws on the social sciences, geography, new materialist thought and object-oriented ontology.