Introduction: After the Postsecular

Abstract

The secularization thesis is dead. There is no doubt whatever about that. Over years that have begun to stretch into decades, through the work of a diverse array of scholars-from Talal Asad, José Casanova, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor, down to Americanists like Tracy Fessenden, Toni Wall Jaudon, Kathryn Lofton, John Modern, and Michael Warner-the notion that something called "secularization" provides an adequate conceptual framework for the post-Enlightenment movement of bodies and belief, of thought and authority, has come under sustained and multidimensional assault. We have become, as the term goes, postsecular, to the degree we understand those assaults to have been, finally, cumulatively, fatal. It's a fairly noncontroversial position at this point, as stated by Asad way back in 2003: "If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable" (2003, 1). Disenchantment, a swing from superstition to rationality, credulity to skepticism, eschatological fanaticism to liberal tolerance: ours is a scholarly moment no longer persuaded by the clarities of these stories of modernity, nor by the neat dichotomies nested within them. So the secularization thesis is dead. This must be distinctly understood. To be clear, this sense of the postsecular does not carry with it a particular historical claim, as opposed to the desecularization narrative recently offered by the chastened secularization theorist Peter Berger

“In the Way of the Gift”: The Postsecular Conditions of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

“…See, for example, Branch and Knight (2018). 2 For example, see Coviello and Hickman (2014), who identify three different approaches to postsecularism, which they suggest depart more or less from Taylor's historical narrative of secularity. Of course, Taylor invites such criticism when his first chapter opens with a question that assumes a secularization narrative: "why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?"…”

Introducing the Postsecular

“…Yet while postsecular social and political studies have already begun to account for the diversity of postsecular societies across the globe (see especially Stoeckl, Rosati, and Holton 2012), the majority of postsecular cultural criticism still focuses on anglophone and especially on North American literature (McClure 2007;Kaufmann 2009; Carruthers and Tate 2010; Corrigan 2015)to the extent that this strand of scholarship already has a sense of its own history and is reviewing its foci, concepts, and methods (Coviello and Hickman 2014). The study of postsecular art in transnational contexts and across diverse media, on the other hand, is still in its infancy.…”

Bodies and their Care in a Secular Age

“…10. See Coviello and Hickman (2014), Fessenden (2014), Kaufmann (2007), Pecora (2006), andSeth (2009). In recent years there has been a push to find new ways of thinking about American secularity-usually framed within the concept of the "postsecular."…”

“…This recent scholarship most often adopts the term "secularism" (rather than "secularization") to describe the processes that have shaped global modernity. Key sources on secularism include Asad (1993Asad ( , 1995Asad ( , 2002Asad ( , 2011, Casanova (1994), Coviello and Hickman (2014), Fessenden (2007Fessenden ( , 2014, Kaufmann (2007), Lofton (2011), Mahmood (2008), Modern (2011), Seth (2009), Taylor (2007), and Warner, VanAntwerpen and Calhoun (2010). 3.…”