Miracle & Machine is, in a first moment, a sort of “reader’s guide” to Jacques Derrida’s 1994–5 essay “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida’s most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It thus provides essential background for understanding Derrida’s essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship between relig ... More Miracle & Machine is, in a first moment, a sort of “reader’s guide” to Jacques Derrida’s 1994–5 essay “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida’s most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It thus provides essential background for understanding Derrida’s essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship between religion, science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis of Derrida’s treatment of everything from the nature of religious revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, fundamentalism, and secularism, to the way religion is today being transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide telecommunications networks. But Miracle & Machine is much more than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to scores of other Derrida texts, both early and late, it also provides a unique introduction to Derrida’s work in general. Finally, Miracle & Machine attempts to put Derrida’s ideas about religion to the test by reading alongside “Faith and Knowledge” an already classic work of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it, Don DeLillo’s 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the very same relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious revelation and the world wide web, messianicity and weapons of mass destruction, in a word, the miracle and the machine.