Adam S. Miller

Professor of Philosophy Adam S Miller

"You won't like this book. Ecclesiastes is gloomy, skeptical, and irreverent. It is caustic and drolly splenetic. It is unapologetically human. It refuses to abet our hunger for clean narratives and happy endings. It is a hopeless book. Insisting on life's futility, the world's capriciousness, and God's inscrutability, it deliberately cultivates despair. It sees such bone-deep hopelessness as the only cure for what ails us. Ecclesiastes is a hard book full of hard sayings. It is an anvil against which our hearts must be hammered. No wonder we avoid it. But the cost of avoidance is high. As Paul insists, in order to become Christian, we must first learn to be hopeless. Hopelessness is the door to Zion. Hopelessness is crucial to a consecrated life. Before we can find hope in Christ, we must give up hope in everything else." In "Nothing New Under the Sun," Adam S. Miller provides a sharp, contemporary paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, continuing to work in the same vein as the popular "Grace is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans" (2015).

A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes

Nothing New Under the Sun

Adam Miller

Like Adam Miller's work on Ecclesiastes and Romans, The Sun Has Burned My Skin is a loose paraphrase that aims more for the replication of a certain mood than for the correspondence of particular words and phrases. The songs themselves are a collection of age-old Israelite love songs, searing and intense, sung principally by a young woman who is bold, confident, and only just exposed to the tidal pull of love and sex.

Professor of Philosophy Adam S Miller

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