Sacred Modes of Being in a Postsecular World

How do we talk meaningfully about the sacred in contexts where conventional religious expression has so often lost its power? Inspired by the influential work of David Jasper, this important volume builds on his thinking to identify sacrality in a world where the old religious and secular debates have exhausted themselves and theology struggles for a new language in their wake. Distinguished writers explore here the idea of the sacred as one that exists, paradoxically, in a space that is both possible and impossible: profoundly theological on the one hand, but also deeply this-worldly and irreligious on the other. This is a sacredness that is simultaneously 'present' and 'absent': one which encompasses - as Jasper himself characterises it - 'the impossible possibility of an absolute vision'. The book teaches us that the sacred assumes a renewed potency when fully engaged with the creativity that happens across religion, literature, philosophy and the arts.

This is a high-quality volume that will be widely read. It brings together accomplished contributors who have produced uniformly original and exciting work. All of the contributions are written according to very high standards of lucidity and rigour, and it contains some really interesting developments of the notion of the sacred in theological thinking that I feel sure will continue to be cited and discussed for quite some time to come. Daniel Whistler, Royal Holloway

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