ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger’s Dialectics of Secularization and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age established two arguably founding tropes of postsecular discourse: the critique of secularism and the productive intersection of continental philosophical thought and the Catholic theological tradition. This essay concerns John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory which predates these crucial contributions by over 15 years and its sequel Beyond Secular Order which in a sense reflects on them both. The essay expounds, furthermore, some of the perspectives of ‘Blue Labour’, the most immediate political expression of intellectuals of Milbank’s persuasion and a crucial development in the world of the postsecular. My thesis is that Milbank’s work, and that of Blue Labour more generally, renew the traditions of Catholic Christianity in an eclectic fashion and present us with an ‘aberrant’ (a term whose use I explicate later in the chapter) postsecularity in so far as it proceeds from presuppositions about the status of the secular and modernity typically uncommon in the works of other notable postsecular thinkers like Habermas and Taylor.
