How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds - and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles. According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the "paradoxical machine" of grace reveals its powers, a point where we "cannot say if we are moving or being moved." The ambiguity of action and passion turns out to be the conceptual core of grace, which has its origins in thousands-of-years-old gift exchange. With this, Grace and Gravity builds on the central premise of his previous book, The Sympathy of Things , that "things are giving and generous." By continuing to present us with a world of pure wonder the most trivial things are suddenly aligned, as if by enchantment, with the most complex ideas. With its innovative terminology, its anachronical method of writing, its unrelenting argumentation and rigorous conclusions, Grace and Gravity will prove indispensable to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.