Introduction

On the 23 of December 1999, God’s obituary appeared in The Economist. Its author declared that after a ‘lengthy career, the Almighty recently passed into history’. Writing in 2009, Alister McGarth observed that heresy had never been so popular as an area of study, arguing that it offered a liberating challenge to authority: 'Religious orthodoxy is equated with claims to absolute authority, which are to be resisted and subverted in the name of freedom. It argues that heresy and heretical identities create fluid borderlands that not only blur simple demarcations of the religious and secular, but infer new forms of orthodoxy through an exchange of ideas. It shows that not only do heretical concepts grapple with decaying role of religion in public life, but with rapidly shifting notions of cultural and political orthodoxy. Ultimately, Benn's chapter demonstrates that many of the key aspects of religious orthodoxy are still of central concern within multicultural and multi-faith society the authors inhabit today.