January 17, 2012
"In suggesting that many modernist texts are shot through with and even shaped by spiritual concerns, I mean several things: that they make room in the worlds they project for magic, miracle, metaphysical systems of retribution and restoration; that they explore fundamental issues of conduct in ways that honor, interrogate, and revise religious categories and prescriptions; that their political analyses and prescriptions are intermittently but powerfully framed in terms of magical or religious conceptions of power. But I means as well, that their assaults on realism, their ontological playfulness, and their experiments in the sublime represent a complex and variously inflected reaffirmation of premodern ontologies-contructions of reality that portray the quotidian world as but one dimension of a multidimensional cosmos, or as a hosting world of spirits. I am arguing, then, that some of the very features of fiction which secular theorists have singled out as definitively postmodern must at least in some cases be understood in terms of a post-secular project of resacralization. But at the same time, I will argue, this process of resacralization can only be understood, in its historical specificity, with the help of secular theorists who have ignored it."

John A. McClure,

“Postmodern/Post-Secular:  Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality”

April 27, 2010
The Pretend Pluralism of the Perennial Philosophy Sort

 ”Just as hitting home runs is the monopoly of one sport, salvation is the monopoly of one religion. If you see sin as the human predicament and salvation as the solution, then it makes sense to come to Christ. But that will not settle as much as you might think, because the real question is not which religion is best at carrying us into the end zone of salvation but which of the many religious goals on offer we should be seeking. Should we be trudging toward the end zone of salvation, or trying to reach the finish line of social harmony? Should our goal be reincarnation? Or to escape from the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth?”

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