Introduction

Summary

This introduction marks out the space of the following volume, as it takes its bearings from David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy and explores its implications through various sacred modes of being. It sets out the terms of a now questioned antagonism between religion and the secular by looking at a renewed relationship, as reconstituted by the postsecular, between religion and theology. It suggests that theology, as a cultural practice, must now reckon not only with the secular but also with an increasingly contested religious conception, and it does so through the concept of the sacred. In looking at how the sacred has been recently modulated through such theorists as Girard and Agamben, and then through the poetics of Rilke and Nietzsche, a new understanding emerges, one in which theology takes on, necessarily, a cultural mode, and culture, necessarily, a theological mode. The contributing chapters are then positioned around these modes, to suggest and exemplify, in their interdisciplinary approach, a new sense of living and dwelling in the sacred.