ABSTRACT
Transcendence is not the easiest of works to read. 1 Its shared authorship gives rise to divergence as much as convergence, and multiple intellectual trajectories that occasionally seem prone to lead away from, rather than buttress, its central themes. Yet it remains a landmark in the critical realist project. While its authors rightly acknowledge the stimulus offered to their thinking through the ‘spiritual turn’ in the later writings of Roy Bhaskar, this volume is best seen as an independent treaty on the place of religion in general, and religious beliefs in particular, in accounts of reality. It is impossible to summarize such a complex work in such a brief compass; happily, this is not necessary for the purposes of this essay. The central point is that Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas Porpora create and legitimize conceptual space, not merely for religious belief, but also for specifically nuanced notions of God, in contemporary social discourse.
