This book is a splendid analysis, recovery, expansion, and purification of speculative method to address myriads of problems confronting contemporary societies. Like no other, Hemmer’s picturesque style perfectly grasps not only the intricacies of Robert M. Doran’s thoughts on systematic theology, its retrieval of Bernard Lonergan’s pre-Method systematic/speculative theological writings but also the complexities of the specific goal of speculation as understanding of faith. A worthy response to classicism, conservatism, post-modernist claims, and liberalism. A welcome engagement with the anthropological, semiotic, and psychoanalytic challenges of the modern notion of culture, science, philosophy, and the new context for theology which is empirical and pluralistic.
— Joseph Ogbonnaya, Marquette University
Ryan Hemmer has written a ressourcement of theological method. The great victory of this book is, therefore, its insistence that only human understanding retrieves anything, and that theological speculation is the method of and for understanding. Against the nostalgia that distrusts present hands to hold the wealth of the theological past, and against the dreaming that distrusts present hands to hold the future, The Death and Life of Speculative Theology argues for a critical realism that knows how much we lose when we forget the necessity of the present and of ourselves in it. If our hands are those that must do the work of Christian theology, then Hemmer helps us by placing in our care the medieval past’s insights into the task of understanding, which is to say, he recovers speculative theological method. And so, casting down the crown of theology, TheDeath and Life renews it with neither power nor authority, but with questions, and with the theologian who must ask them.
— Anne M. Carpenter, Danforth Chair in Theological Studies, Saint Louis University