Scheherazade is the central trope that governs Salman Rushdie’s depictions of women. For Rushdie, who was raised on The Arabian Nights, she was the strong woman figure whom he admired the most. Most of his women characters are made in her image and are strong, wily survivors. They are storytellers who, by their wit and wisdom, manage to save themselves, their cultures, and countries through extremely difficult times. Rushdie’s women are drawn admiringly as strong women: Padma the writer’s muse, Amina Sinai the matriarch, and Indira Gandhi the politician in Midnight’s Children; Omar Khayyam’s fawning mothers in Shame; and all the strong women in The Satanic Verses – the Prophet’s wife, Khadija, and the Sufayan sisters, Aurora Zogoiby, and Qara Köz. For Rushdie, Scheherazade herself is the strongest, most admired woman, as we can see in his most recent collection of essays.

Wallace “dabbled in religion,” as Matthew Gilbert put it in a 1997 interview with the author, but while he was openly intrigued by it, Wallace eschewed organized religion. Much of his work is characterized by a search for meaning that in other circumstances or periods would have constituted religious questing, and the absence of belief is generally portrayed in his work as part of the malaise of contemporary life. Religious language permeates the corpus, and religious iconography plays a significant role in several texts. Belief as a good in itself appears to be promoted in his work on politics, on aesthetics, and on culture, with the idea of faith central to his project of working against solipsism, but religion as a practice is often viewed with suspicion. This essay traces that pattern in Wallace’s writing, beginning with Broom’s connection of evangelical religion with capitalism by way of the G.O.D and the figure of John, the wasted prophet son of immense wealth, positioning a particularly American form of religious practice as pernicious and profit-driven. Don’s particular ambivalence about religion in Infinite Jest highlights a complex relationship between faith as a personal attribute and religion as a collective one. The essay argues that Wallace’s approach to religious thought bears the same ambivalent inflections as his work on art and entertainment, which can both inspire thought and suppress it. Nevertheless, the essay argues that while Wallace appeared to view organized religion with some wariness, the metanarratives of religion – belief, faith, transcendence and a sense of the sacred – constitute vital and consistent themes of his craft.

In the wake of 9/11, postsecularism has emerged as a capacious critical perspective that challenges the historical narrative of Enlightenment secularization. Postsecular critique observes the persistence of religion in modernity and connects its persistence to historical religion as a longer and unbroken narrative of national, cultural, and legal discourses. Drawing on intellectual history, the anthropology of religion, and New England colonial historiography, this essay argues that our contemporary understanding of the United States is deepened by rereading the nation’s puritan past from a postsecular perspective. The essay considers the travails of Roger Williams, the Antinomian Controversy, and the puritan treatment of the early Quakers as important contributions to American perspectives on the separation of church and state, the role of spirituality in the secular, and the legal and procedural application of “tolerance.”