ABSTRACT
The essays in this collection reflect a perception that ‘the sacred’ is now being explored in literature that engages with diverse cultural experiences, instead of being contained within exclusively Western forms of writing such as Christian Church-sponsored academic theology. Arguably, however, these new literary explorations do not reject the Christian structures of the past, so much as take that inheritance into account in new – often critical – ways that soften divisions between ‘religion/the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ or even challenge the binary notions themselves in ways that can appear unsettling to those within a contemporary context who find themselves longing for the – possibly unattainable – comforts of broad consensus on legitimate and authentic tradition.
