In this study, I consider five of the most eminent children’s novels of the Golden Age period, 1860-1920, The Water-Babies by Rev. Charles Kingsley, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, to illustrate that the central concern of all of these novels is what it means to be a child self engaged with the world and growing up. It is my contention that, if we are to embrace what Marah Gubar terms a “kinship model” of children’s literature scholarship that sees the child and adult as in relationship to one another, a new vocabulary is necessary to discuss child and adult selfhood. In this project, I propose using Charles Taylor’s postsecular theory as a foundation for this new language, thus offering the terms porous and buffered as a new way of understanding the relationship between a child and the adult she becomes.

Contemporary American novels over the last forty years have developed a unique orientation toward religious and spiritual rhetoric that can best be understood within the multidisciplinary concept of the postsecular. In the morally-tinged discourse of their characters, several esteemed American novelists (John Updike, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy) since 1970 have used sermons or sermon-like artifacts to convey postsecular attitudes and motivations. These postsecular sermons express systems of belief that are hybrid, exploratory, and confessional in nature. Through rhetorical analysis of sermons in four contemporary American novels, this dissertation explores the performance of postsecularity in literature and defines the contribution of those tendancies to the field of literary and rhetorical studies.

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious zealotry and the supernatural.

H.D.’s novel Palimpsest has often been analyzed using psychoanalytic theories due to her relationship with Sigmund Freud and his work. However, her own approach to the science of psychoanalysis reveals that she often complemented her scientific understanding with her syncretic religious beliefs, a perspective she referred to as “spiritual realism,” which suggests that analysis with a spiritual nuance may provide a deeper understanding of the novel’s intended purpose. Postsecular theory makes for a useful lens by which to analyze Palimpsest’s treatment of reintegrating spiritual knowledge into Freud’s secular understanding of the modern world by providing the benefits of such a paradigm shift. Because H.D. adopted the ocean as her metaphor for spirituality, eternity, and transcendence, integrating oceanic and archipelagic theories also help to analyze H.D.’s intentions for spiritual realism by providing the characteristics with which illustrate her ritualistic writing process and its transformative experiences.My reading of the novel using postsecular and oceanic/archipelagic theories reveals that Palimpsest has more significance beyond a psychoanalytic treatment of H.D.’s own traumatic past. Instead, H.D.’s reasons for breaking down secular constructs of reality—such as time, space, memory, and individuality—emerge, showing that as an artistic modernist, she was attempting to outline the spiritual solution to modernity’s weaknesses and secularity’s limitations. By providing examples of characters’ poetic communions with eternity, Palimpsest explores the spiritual potential within humanity’s palimpsestic multi-layered consciousness, expressing how that which can transcend time, space, limits of communication, and personal failures can be discovered inward through outward spiritual connection to the eternal. This reading also provides justifications for H.D.’s decisions to write poetic prose novels, an answer to the alienating secular approaches to psychoanalytic knowledge that denied her identity as a poet-oracle, revealing her intent to share spiritual realism’s transformative power despite its secular critics.

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This dissertation constructively explores the implications for natural theology of (especially) John McDowell’s anti-Cartesian philosophy of mind and perception. Traditionally, an important element within natural theology is the idea that nature testifies to its creator, thereby making knowledge of a creator available to humans. In traditional accounts, the relevant knowledge is usually conceived as inferential. From observations of “the things that have been made” (Rom 1: 20), we may reason our way to the existence of a creator. The dissertation presents an alternative construal of creation’s testimony. It argues that biological nature may have expressive properties of a similar kind as human behaviour and art seem to have. We may be able to perceive nature as creation, i.e., as expressive of the mind of a creator. The knowledge of a creator acquired from nature is, according to this construal, perceptual rather than inferential. The viability of the dissertation’s suggestion depends, however, on the rejection of certain common and fundamental assumptions about the nature of mind and perception – assumptions that may rightly be called “Cartesian.” In chapters 1-3, a radically anti-Cartesian outlook on mind and perception, drawn mainly from McDowell’s work, is presented. The outlook (labelled “open-mindedness”) conceives the mind as a system of essentially world-involving capacities. One such capacity is perception, which is portrayed as (when all goes well) a direct, cognitive openness to the world. Chapter 4 argues that open-mindedness makes an attractive construal of our knowledge of “other minds” available. Human behaviour may, as McDowell suggests, be construed as having expressive properties, i.e., perceivable properties the instantiation of which logically entails the instantiation of certain mental properties. The main problem confronting this idea is the so-called “argument from pretence” – a version of the more general “argument from illusion.” The fact that behaviour that is the result of pretence can be indistinguishable, for an observer, from behaviour that is genuinely expressive of the mental property pain, can seem to entail that it is impossible to perceive that somebody else is in pain. It is argued that accepting the outlook of open-mindedness and the view of perception it includes dissolves this problem and makes it possible to construe (some of) our knowledge of the mental states of other people as perceptual rather than inferential knowledge. Chapter 5 argues that the same philosophical moves that dissolve the “problem of other minds” also can be used to overcome the problems confronting the (from a Christian perspective) attractive idea that nature may be perceptibly expressive of the mind of a creator. It is argued that the idea that other phenomena than human behaviour can be genuinely expressive of mind is not at all counter-intuitive. Artworks have, for instance, (according to a common view) expressive properties that make something of the mental life of the artist available to others. Furthermore, many people seem to have experiences in which natural structures appear to them as intentionally created. Even atheists report that biological organisms strike them as “designed.” Experiences in which natural phenomena appear to the subject as intentionally created or “designed” are candidates for being veridical perceptions of expressive properties in nature. It is argued that the suggested construal of biological nature as expressive of the mind of a creator is completely compatible with the fact that biological species have evolved by natural selection. Chapter 6 briefly reflects on the consequences of the dissertation’s argument for Christian theology.

In the age of mass information, globalization, and peer-to-peer social networks, the traditional markers of identity and elective affinities, particularly those of religion and nationalism, are shifting in relation to contemporary trends. The field of Religious Studies has been influenced by a series of ‘post’s: postsecular, postmodern, postcolonial, and post 9/11. The rise of revolutionary religious movements internationally is a hallmark characteristic of the postsecular age. Participants in these movements are variously characterized as religious dissidents, militant secularists, neo-fascist nationalists, and terrorists. However, according to the dialogues within these communities, participants do not think of themselves in these terms. The dualizing labels of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ do not lend meaning to these contemporary identities. This thesis addresses the question: How do traditional and contemporary theories in the field of Religious Studies evaluate contemporary religious nationalist movements, and how do their analyses compare to how members of the groups in question perceive themselves? To answer this question, this dissertation examines and contrasts four key case studies: the Native Faith Movement and Femen in Ukraine, and the Gezi Park protesters and the Gülen Movement in Turkey. By analyzing group activities through the fora of the curated digital presences of group leaders and members, this research investigates emerging elective affinities and markers of identity which transcend the religious/secular binary. Contemporary theory from the field of Critical Religion and feminist theology transcending the religious/secular binary will be applied to these case studies in order to gain a deeper understanding of the shifting relationships between religion, protest and the nation.

Syftet med denna kunskapsöversikt är att undersöka vad forskningen säger om argument för att ge religionsfrånvaro, ateism och icke-tro en plats i religionskunskapsundervisningen. Vetenskapliga källor i form av avhandlingar och artiklar ligger till grund för kunskapsöversikten och sammanfattningsvis pekar forskarna på att Sverige är ett sekulariserat eller möjligen postsekulariserat, pluralistiskt samhälle där skolan enligt läroplanen ska vara icke-konfessionell. Religionsutövningen har ändrat sin form och fått nya uttryck där andlighet och individualisering tar plats. Kursplanerna i religion i årskurs 1–6 saknar begrepp såsom ateism och icke-tro och observerad religionsundervisning i högstadiet och gymnasiet visar att de ickereligiösa ses som norm och att ämnesdiskussionerna mellan elever ofta utgår från ett vi och dem-tänk. Den insamlade forskningen lyfter flera argument för en breddad religionsundervisning såsom att ett utökat ämnesspråk kan skapa friare diskussionsmöjligheter. Fler elever kan identifiera sig med religionsämnet om även ateism och icke-tro betraktas som en form av tro, och icke-konfessionell religionsundervisning behöver omfatta även ett källkritiskt förhållningssätt. En vidgad begreppsförståelse skapar ett mer inkluderande klassrum där olikheter bemöts med större förståelse och respekt.

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This thesis explores the ways in which Christian faith ‘adds value’ to the ‘carescape’ and ‘caringscapes’ of statutory hostels for people experiencing homelessness in the United Kingdom. The ways that a distinctively Christian organisational ethos is created and experienced through the material, regulatory and performative dimensions of space, place and subjectivity, are explored through a case study of the Salvation Army’s contemporary statutory accommodation services for single homeless people. Drawing upon Cloke’s notions of ‘theo-ethics’ and Conradson’s concept of ‘therapeutic landscape experience’, the links between spirituality, care and ‘value added’ are examined from the perspective of staff, volunteers and service users. This analysis extends the debate on the potential for faith-based organisations to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to care for people experiencing homelessness, by foregrounding the spiritual and emotional dimensions that texture these organisational landscapes of care. A feminist epistemological approach is taken to illuminate the nuances of care-giving and care-receiving, with particular attention paid to the emotional and spiritual sensitivities underpinning social interactions, and how these dimensions are perceived, narrated and experienced from a variety of perspectives. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study involved the undertaking of 91 semi-structured interviews, a six-week period of participant observation in a specific Salvation Army Lifehouse, and attendance at four professional social service and chaplaincy conferences run by the Salvation Army UK. The research findings suggest that Christianity adds value to these institutional spaces of care in a highly nuanced way, dependent on one’s subjectivity. A second observation is that the potential for faith to add value within statutory arenas of care for the homeless is being compromised due to the pressures associated with the incumbent neoliberal contract culture within which Lifehouses are embedded. A third contribution concerns the potential for a faith-based organisation to act as a crucible for the emergence of postsecular rapprochement: it is suggested that an intersectional approach to analysing this socio-spatial process is necessary, due to the strategic role that gender, age, sexuality and race were revealed to play in fostering, or dissipating, the affective relationships that underpinned fragile moments of rapprochement.