Secular theology builds upon the growing recognition and critique of the limitations of the confining box of religion built in and through the modern secularist dispensation. A bipolar model of religion and the secular, and the classificatory web within which it is nestled, have limited theology's field of vision and engagement. This article explores several examples of projects of transcendence that resist easy identification with either the religious or the secular, illuminating the limitations of the religion-secular classification and the diffuse cultural trends that are reconfiguring it, even leading beyond it.
A Conflicted BoundarySecular theology is an arresting label. It juxtaposes terms that not only belong to different discursive constellations, but secure their differentiation. Their provocative re-alignment captures both the exhaustion of conventional theology and the glimmers of productive new directions. Secular theology signals a critique of the truncated category of religion that essentially has become one half of a larger religionsecular dyad. There are theological precedents for such critique. Impatience with the confining box of religion built in and through the modern secularist dispensation runs through the writings of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and H. Richard Niebuhr. As Harvey Cox argued in his now classic The Secular City, "God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life." 1 John Dewey advanced a similar critique of religion that was more radical in its constructive implications for theology. He argued that the modern idea of religion undercuts the function and values of the "genuinely religious" when it is com-