On June 17, 2015, Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina State Senator and senior pastor at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was shot to death along with eight of his parishioners by a white supremacist. At Pinckney's funeral nine days later, Barack Obama eulogised Pinckney with a speech on the theme of grace. Pinckney's killer ‘could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney’; ‘he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood—the power of God's grace’. Moreover, according to Obama, ‘God has visited grace upon us’ in the wake of the tragedy by allowing Americans to newly notice their faults—the nation's continuing struggle with racism (Obama 2015).

Obama reminds his listeners that grace is an unearned, extraordinary gift. He associates it with an ‘open heart’, where we can find, in words he borrows from writer Marilynne Robinson, a ‘reservoir of goodness’ beyond what is accessible to us in ordinary life. ‘If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace’. Pause. ‘Amazing grace’. Thirteen-second pause. Obama begins to sing the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. Obama concludes that each of the nine Black men and women killed at Mother Emanuel found grace, and the examples of their lives offer it to us. In his closing words, Obama pleads, ‘May God continue to shed His grace on the United States of America’.

Here, as in much of the ethnography presented in this collection, we have grace in the social imaginary—or, in a particular, powerful social imaginary. Extraordinary. Undeserved. Healing. Teaching. Saving. Good. Individual and collective. A gift of those who suffer and a gift of all. Sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. Authored by God, performed in human life. Willed into being by a politician interrupting his speech with song. In short, contradictory and essential. In the early twenty-first-century US social imaginary, grace takes the spotlight at a moment of national tension and reflection. But, as in Julian Pitt-Rivers’ (1992) England of the twentieth century, the language of grace is also so familiar as to often go unnoticed.

Obama invokes grace and he performs grace. He sings of grace, and the surprise of his song breaks open new possibilities, promising to free listeners from the familiar, repetitious pattern of racial violence, condemnation, mourning—and then more violence. In invoking grace, he performs his signature rhetorical move: conjuring hope. The future can be radically different from the past. We get versions of this in the preceding pages, not least in the story Itzhak tells about healing. But this is also the American promise, the promise embodied by Obama. The good in people can surprise us. The good in the nation, even in government, can surprise us. This is Obama's story and America's story, but it is also, as ‘Amazing Grace’ reminds listeners, God's story. Grace, as the authors here show, often collapses figures and frames. At Mother Emanuel, in the embrace of grace, leader, nation, and divinity align.

But Obama is not just any leader: he is a Black man. He is among those threatened by the Charleston shooting, among those targeted by the horrific tradition of anti-Black violence in which it participates. Obama does not sing of forgiveness, but he sings of overwhelming goodness that sweeps away the sins of the world. He does not seek retribution or even accountability but a new racial order of things, where racial violence is no longer woven into the fabric of the nation. Because he is a powerful victim, replete with the honours of office, he is uniquely positioned to offer grace—grace that promises not just to secure order but to secure new order, to reweave even more tightly the social fabric.

This is the point at which we scholars distinguish ourselves from laypeople by means of our critical spirit (and, not unrelatedly, at which leftists distinguish themselves from liberals). Obama's performance of grace, like his rhetoric of hope, pacifies. It turns attention away from the depths of white supremacy, as not just an individual vice or a subculture but a pathology of the United States as a whole, infecting everything from laws and policies to ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling. And it distracts from the grassroots organising work that would be required to rightly address racial injustice. Grace promises unity in transformation, but from a position of power. Transformation from the perspective of the powerful looks like more of the same from the perspective of the powerless: that is just how power works.

In recent years, resurgent Black American political organising responding to police violence has converged with new developments in Black studies to resource an even deeper critique of Obama's performance of grace. Suspicion of respectability and its accoutrements makes activists approach churches, hymns, and heterosexual men in suits lecturing from pulpits warily. Such men are always performing grace—in the model of Martin Luther King, Jr., they are paradigms of charisma—and they are always doing so in a way that satisfies the white gaze, enforcing the patriarchal norms around gender and sexuality that necessarily accompany whiteness (Edwards 2012). Even more cutting is the concern, associated with the label Afropessimism, that Blackness is the constitutive exclusion of Western ontology (Wilderson 2020). This exclusion is managed through carefully circumscribed inclusion of the right kinds of Blackness: excessive, surprising, titillating, sensuous, free—in short, with the markers of grace.

Many of those same Black political organisers and scholars who in recent years have sharpened and deepened the critique of anti-Blackness have developed sophisticated ways of discussing what W. E. B. Du Bois (1924) once called ‘the gift of Black folk’ (see Winters 2018). If Blackness is the constitutive exclusion of Western ontology, and Western ontology is implicated in ongoing, genocidal violence writ large and writ small, then it is both necessary and impossible to access Blackness in its pure form. Blackness promises salvation for all. It promises to interrupt the ways of the world, to surprise, to open unlimited possibility—in short, once again, Blackness is associated with grace. But accessing graced Blackness, from this perspective, means turning away from power, toward those evading power. The figure of the Black fugitive, whether a literal fugitive from slavery or an artist or musician animated by the spirit of fugitivity, becomes the site of grace. The task of the scholar becomes that of curating performances of fugitive Black grace, all responsive to the founding experience of Blackness, the constitutive exclusion manifest in the slave ship. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013: 97) put it, ‘The hold's terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons’. What had once been accessible only through ‘a shaman, a witch, a seer, a poet’, now become an ‘insurgent feel’ distributed among many whose lives are shadowed by the legacy of slavery (2013: 98).

Even as contemporary Black activists are wary of Christianity, it is hard not to see the Christian theological imagination at work in accounts of Blackness that the Instagram vernacular would label with the hashtag extra. That which is beyond the world, unspeakable in the language of the world, exceeding all concepts, interrupts the world. At the sites of eruption, ordering logics are thwarted, new forms of sociality become possible, and time runs in an odd way. While the preferred metaphors in Black studies rely on depth (hold, undercommons) instead of height, the theological structure is strikingly similar. Indeed, the Christian theological imagination often toys with the parallel work of ascent and descent on a spiritual path. While there is a particular version of this story told in the academic field of Black studies, the structure is one that animates academic work across disciplines, including perhaps, as Edwards and McIvor suggest in their introduction, much of anthropology. Regular people, in ordinary life, employ concepts and habits that are infected by ideology. The remedy is provided by the scholar who turns to the practices of a marginalised or distant community, or a literary or artistic work, guiding her audience on a journey away from the ordinary and opening her to an encounter with the surprising and potentially transformative—singing her own version of Amazing Grace.

Put another way, the critical disposition (of the humanist, and so the anthropologist when she is in a humanistic spirit) does not turn away from grace as we find it in Obama's performance but, still entranced by its logic, looks elsewhere for it: below rather than above, outside rather than inside. Moreover, cleaving grace from its false copies is at the very heart of the critical endeavour. False copies of grace pin us to the status quo, securing the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The real thing, ever elusive, promises transformation. Scholarly formation and the imperative to rigour sharpen our capacity to discern, like the Orthodox believers that Tateo discusses, real grace from its others.

This story has a Christian theological shape, but it lacks the subtlety of theology. When theological forms migrate into secular spaces—political, cultural, and scholarly—they simplify, sometimes dangerously. In the case of grace, this often means a lapse into supersessionism: a simplistic opposition between law and grace, between normative order and its redemptive interruptions (Lloyd 2011; Rose 1984). In Christian thought, supersessionism fuels anti-Semitism. In other domains, it casts some as essentially damned and others as promised salvation: the logic of domination, of colonial, racial, and patriarchal violence that authorises itself in the name of the pursuit of goodness. Lars von Trier's protagonist in Manderlay, a film about a white woman who sets about to free slaves and that was filmed during the US invasion of Iraq, is named Grace. To set the slaves free, Grace proudly overturns ‘Mam's Law’ that had governed the plantation. The result is destruction and Black death.

Christian theologians have spent two millennia developing technical vocabularies and schema to understand grace. To take but one example, Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between healing grace, making right corrupt human nature, and elevating grace, making possible meritorious actions that make humans worthy of salvation and that would not be possible without grace. Sometimes Aquinas introduces a third sense of grace, the sort that involves participation in the divine and fully transcends human nature. Versions of all three appear in the lives discussed in this collection. Across time and denominations, Christian theologians have generated a multitude of ways of classifying grace, its relationship to the natural world, and how it relates to human action. Instead of a stark opposition between ordering law and interruptive grace, Christian theologians have grappled with the folds of mediation and with the way the surprising and excessive is always situated within the orderly—while maintaining the essential connection between grace and transcendence.

The wonderful thing about anthropology, from my perspective in the humanities, is that the work of ethnography, at its best, deeply engages with the complex texture of individual and communal life, complicating simplistic distinctions and temptations to lean on conventional wisdom. In this way, anthropologies of grace and theologies of grace share a common orientation. Where the theologian appeals to reason, tradition, and imagination to sharpen her account of grace, the anthropologist draws on her fieldwork—a process which itself involves reason, tradition, and imagination, albeit described rather differently. In short, it is easy to imagine deeply enriching conversations between theologians and anthropologists. Here I confine myself to announcing the promise of engagement with Christian theological discourse rather than conducting it.

The articles in this volume each move toward the paradoxes and promises of grace in ways that closely track paradoxes and promises probed by theologians, and I will redescribe some of these in a way that they would appear in the discourse of theology:

• There is a rich and complex normative palate associated with grace. Rather than good or bad, grace opens questions of goodness, truth, and beauty. Opens questions: making new conversations about these topics possible rather than providing answers or, put another way, orienting us (as scholars and as witnesses to grace) to those questions (Lloyd 2018). Like the Taiwanese believers discussed here by Breen, the theologian, at her best, respects the fundamental opacity of grace, just as she respects the fundamental opacity of God (like grace, God by definition is excessive, impossible to capture in the concepts of the world).

• There is a perplexing relationship between trauma and grace, both markers of excess, of experience beyond comprehension and control. Trauma is a privileged site of grace, and grace is a salve to trauma. But this is no closed circuit; that would run against the definition of each. Christian theologians are particularly attentive to these matters: somehow, the torture and death of Jesus is tethered to grace, and imitating Jesus is a path toward grace, but the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are not identical, and enduring suffering, as some of Itzhak's interlocutors in Rwanda know painfully well, does not cause salvation for anyone.

• Grace is at once visible and invisible, and maintaining the right relationship between visible and invisible is essential to grace as a phenomenon. If grace were purely visible, it would not be surprising, and it would be untethered from transcendence. It follows that naming grace is necessarily a precarious and contested practice.

• For theologians, God is the author of grace, but humans play an essential role in receiving grace. Negotiating the relationship between God and humans at sites of grace produces constructive tension in Christian theological discourse, and in the secular social imaginary—but this tension falls away if God's authorship is not taken seriously. For non-theologians, grace's world-transcending nature is crucial, and similar tensions arise—around hierarchy and love, for example, as in Sommerschuh's account—when a phenomenon authored beyond the world is received in the world.

• There are many phenomena associated with religious excess: grace stands next to charisma, miracles, saints, and the sacred. Tracking the relationships between these phenomena promises to compound the insights yielded through reflection on grace. For the theologian, their common authorship in the divine offers a shortcut to analysing these phenomena, but it is not much of a shortcut when the divine is essentially unknowable, leaving the theologian and the non-theologian interested in grace in the same boat, and with common interests.

• For the Christian theologian, grace is closely tied to creation (some argue nature and grace are inextricable) and salvation (grace makes salvation possible). Attention to grace's role in a theological narrative arc, and corresponding cultural narratives, could constrain the sense of grace as excessive but could also complicate the sense of those broader narratives as constrictive. Theologians are practiced at reading moments of excess as parts of narratives of excess, a strategy that holds promise beyond theology.

• Theologians are sensitive to the risks posed by nostalgia for a time when grace was more plentiful and longing for another such time to come—and the way such narratives of grace emplot communities. Recognising these feelings can sharpen analysis of grace in the present.

• For the Christian theologian, there is a vexed relationship between the grace whose author is God and the grace whose author is a human imitating God, perhaps naturally imaging God. The former is, at its root, a pointer to the good, the true, and the beautiful; the latter may be fundamentally equivocal. Whether this distinction is sustainable outside theological discourse is an open question.

In addition to these many topics for dialogue, especially intriguing are questions around grace's opposite. When we set aside a too-easy opposition between grace and law, or free gift and reciprocal gift, and when we appreciate mediation's integral role in grace, does grace still have an antonym? If grace names excess, perhaps its opposite names deficiency—for example, debt. While debt at first seems quantifiable, part of an accounting logic, some theorists have pointed to a primordial sense of debt, shared by all in a community for what has come before and can never be repaid (Bretherton and Singh 2018; Joseph 2014; Lazzarato 2012; Stimilli 2019). In this sense, debt binds together a community, and binds it to its place and its past. Debt is, at times, quantified, but theorists consider this either a subordinate form of debt or the flip side of unquantifiable debt. As Nietzsche (2006 [1887]) recognised, with particular reference to Christianity, debt and guilt are closely tied, and indebtedness shapes—perhaps shackles—the soul.

Grace takes quantifiable and unquantifiable forms, and equivocates between the two; so, too, with debt. But where debt binds, grace loosens. Where grace interrupts, debt drones on like tinnitus. Where debt narrows a horizon of possibility, submerging it in the world of total measurement to which Steinmüller refers, grace expands it. On first glance, grace seems primarily theological, by extension cultural, whereas debt seems primarily cultural, by extension theological. In fact, both respond to deep existential concerns, and in this they are bound together: to what do I owe thanks (gratitude) for what I have and for who I am? Theologians answer God, and the gratitude owed is immeasurable. Though the answer is not only God: there are proximate objects deserving gratitude as well, and they deserve quantifiable thanks, material or otherwise. But it is that primordial response—immeasurable debt, immeasurable gratitude—that, for many theologians and scholars of religion, motivates a sense of piety that is at the root of things (Stout 2004, chapter 1). With such import, this is also a prime target for worldly powers: they desire to narrate debt and grace, and to do so in the interests of securing the social order. Colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and other systems of domination succeed when they control the narratives of debt and grace. They are vulnerable when new narratives appear—a possibility that grounds the kind of liberatory political projects in which the Christian leftists with whom Mahadev worked, and other activists, engage. Given the existential roots of debt and grace, new narratives are always appearing, or at least points of friction within the standard narratives are becoming visible: attending to these is part of the vocation of the theologian, and of the anthropologist of grace.

Grappling with Christian theological reflection on grace may aid anthropologists, but Christian theologians are increasingly realising that the ways they understand grace are deeply formed by culture—and they have much to learn from anthropologists. For example, King-Ho Leung (2020) has recently tracked a shift in Christian accounts of grace toward a focus on problem-solving (individual sins in need of elimination) that parallels cultural shifts toward technical reasoning. Put another way, grace in the social imaginary is not simply grace secularised; the dynamics are much more complex. Anthropological studies such as those included in this volume attend to that complexity, and cultural critics and Christian theologians have much to learn from them.

It is tempting to read Obama's remarks on grace, and attempted performance of grace, in a strictly critical mood. Yes, his speech and song conceal American nationalism, state management of race and religion (conjoined), and patriarchy masked as vulnerable masculinity. Generating the excess that is grace generates new political capital—distributed in old ways. Articles like the ones collected in this volume caution against taking the strictly critical mood as the start and end of our analysis. Politicians manipulate grace, but when we attend to the ways that grace is entwined in the complex lives and flows of ordinary people and the natural world, might we say that grace itself also manipulates?