ABSTRACT
The epilogue reviews and summarises the challenge of the postsecular in the concept of sacrifice. The sacred is returning, but the sacred makes claims on us and we must respond. We cannot take on the sacred without shedding some of our egotistical orientation. Postsecularism is not just another cultural fashion; indeed, it is not primarily about us. It is the return of an original consciousness in which the self is displaced by the Other, the human by the infinite, the profane by the sacred. This occurs in a context in which the self has usurped the role of the divine, and we have become insensitive to the claims of the Other. Therefore, many expressions of the sacred in our time are perversely inverted or reversed. The challenge of the postsecular is to discover what sacrifice could mean in our time, and how and why the world is full of the old religious virtues gone mad.
