A Secular for Literary Studies

This essay criticizes two prevailing ways of thinking about the relationship between the secular and the religious—the way of enmity and the way of paradox—and affirms a third, more open-ended approach to the secular that looks to literature for what William Connolly calls “mundane transcendence.” The essay then shifts the focus of critical attention from the representation of religion in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow to their representation of “the secular.”