A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.

Spirituality, religion and a sense of the sacred can be important areas for creativity and the re-imagining of social work. This chapter explores this arena, arguing that acknowledging and drawing on spirituality and sacredness are significant parts of social work and that to ignore them is to deny an important dimension of humanity. However, spirituality and sacredness are experienced and manifested in different ways and can be affected by dominant narratives in different cultural and political contexts and at different historical times. This chapter avoids making any claims as to the truth or otherwise of any forms of religion or spirituality and instead considers the role that a sense of the sacred and the spiritual can play in the re-imagining of social work.

When Martin Heidegger famously rose in 1946 to pay tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke on the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death, it was hardly by accident that he framed his interpretation of Rilke’s work by quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s now canonical question (‘Wherefore poets…’) regarding the task of poetry in the time called the present, lines that also enabled Heidegger to voice his own distress at the state in which postwar Germany found itself and, more obliquely, the extent of his own involvement in the events of the previous decade and a half. During these postwar years, there were arguably few more attentive or perceptive readers of Heidegger’s writings on poetry than the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot, whose own opposition to National Socialism was from the outset forceful and unyielding. This chapter examines Blanchot’s borrowings from Heidegger (as deployed in Blanchot’s account of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé), his rigorous and probing criticisms of Heidegger’s thinking, and contrasts with that of Heidegger Blanchot’s own significantly divergent interpretation of the work of Hölderlin and Rilke.

The introduction establishes a framework for the volume as a whole. It explains why questions of temporality are at the heart of political thinking, and points to the several ways in which many (but not all) political thinkers have invoked history. It asks what historians of political thought can learn from the wider ‘temporal turn’ in historical studies inspired by Reinhart Koselleck, while also arguing that the understanding of political thought in terms of plural ‘languages’ of politics, advocated by John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, already offers powerful resources for addressing the issues associated with time and history. Six such linguistic contexts for thinking about politics in time and history are identified – the legal, the sacred, the contingent, the social, the revolutionary and the global – and the individual chapters of the volume are then introduced in relation to these contexts. Particular attention is given to recent developments in global intellectual history. Approaching political thought in these contexts will show that the roles of time and history have amounted to much more than the cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’.

It is a struggle to hold society together. Historically, that task has fallen both to law and religion. Sovereignty, the source of law’s binding power, like the miracle in Carl Schmidt’s political theology, lies outside law itself. That origin coincides with the kenotic excess of the sacred.

This chapter explores that strange excess through a visual genealogy of shifting sovereign imaginaries. They range from early modern legal emblems picturing the transcendental body of the King, to modern and late modern paintings and films depicting a metaphysical shift to the sacred body of the People. The question this visual history confronts is not whether the sacred binds the nomos of law, but how? The corporeal image goes beyond conceptual abstraction. It is a site from which desire (what Freud calls the cathexis of libido) binds us to values, rituals, and institutions. Libidinal investment ties us to a shared symbolic identity; disinvestment, by contrast, invites psychic and political-legal collapse.

As the contemporary crisis in liberal democracy deepens, we ask: what sovereign imaginary will break the pall of collective anxiety and unrest, and will it come in the service of human flourishing?

This Afterword responds to each of the foregoing chapters in relation to the postsecular nature of the sacred. It begins by redirecting the question of the sacred from one of definition to one of enactment, and then proceeds by reflecting on how each chapter might enact the sacred in its own way, even if implicitly, and so often by rummaging in poetry, literature, visual art and language. It finishes by reiterating a possible sacred place in our contemporary deserts in which all opposites might be reconciled in Total Presence.

In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

This chapter explores theology as an answer to the question of how to preserve a Chinese way of thinking while entering into conversation with other world systems of thought. It looks at how theology necessitates an interdisciplinary approach in engagement with literature, especially the study of the classics/scriptures. It interrogates the translation of Western poetry into Chinese as a process accelerating the loss of distinction between “shi” (poetry) and “jing” (scripture). This loss will alter our late modern understanding of the sacred as something that is both poetic and scriptural. The chapter explores the implications this notion of the sacred has for the distinctions made within “religion” itself. If those in the West often feel confused at the notion of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism as three religions in one, and fail to recognize that the Chinese do not perceive these three religions as alternatives, so too poetry and scripture, or art and theology, could be seen as “interpenetrating fields of force” (Hick). The chapter ends by reflecting on the significance such interpenetrating fields might have for a “non-religious Christianity” and even an “atheist theology”.

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.

In the ongoing irresolution between religion and the secular, this chapter looks at the notion of the sacred as something always and already resolved to its counterpart, the profane. In defining the sacred as the opening of the world to its own outside, the chapter explores the reaches of this opening in relation to David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy. Across Jasper’s texts the sacred opens us to a mystical possibility embodied in spaces both real and imagined – such as desert, body or community – where the ascetic and the aesthetic come together. The chapter shows how this embodiment inhabits or dwells within a liturgical space by looking at liturgy’s “ergon” as cultural and communal poesis, which takes both individual and community to their own outside. This “ergon” is thus also a movement, a traversing with reverent care and a respectful silence towards “the impossible possibility of absolute vision” (Jasper). That vision enfolds together literature, art, religion, philosophy and sacrament in order to make possible within our world an impossibility that opens up our world, an opening that is both discovery and loss, both voice and silence, both all and nothing.

This chapter discusses David Jasper’s notion of theological thinking, as this concept is briefly outlined inthe 1995 text “From Theology to Theological Thinking”. It does so by relating sketchily to an early personal encounter with David Jasper on the part of the author, when he faced Jasper with an idea of writing a dialectical post-Christian theology. Jasper was somewhat sceptical about the idea and suggested that theology should rather be post-Ecclesial. The author was rather perplexed by this comment at the time, but in due course realized that they each had very different emphases, despite a profound agreement on certain fundamental cultural issues. This chapter describes Jasper’s notion of theological thinking and puts it in contact with his later works, which may be seen as a kind of post-Ecclesial liturgical writing. This complex is put in relation to the author's own notion of post-Christian theology. The author aims for a more comprehensive critical theoretical perspective that may open up new horizons in radical theology.

I discuss how strong evaluative meaning makes an important difference for a proper account of the nature and extent of the demands for other-regarding concern. The dominant neo-Aristotelian approach has regarded the other-regarding virtues (e.g., justice, generosity, honesty, etc.) as virtues primarily because of their role in promoting the “good functioning of our social group,” which is seen as important for achieving our own flourishing as rational social animals. I focus especially on MacIntyre’s account of other-regarding concern as rooted in social networks of giving and receiving in his book Dependent Rational Animals. What is overlooked in the dominant approach is the strong evaluative sense of human beings as being worthy of our concern for their own sake due to their inherent dignity (or sanctity) and that a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life can be achieved through such concern. I seek to show the difference this makes for ensuring that we regard all human beings as fully amongst us, for making sense of and defending moral absolutes, and for properly responding to the demands of universal and particular concern.