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Pragmatism and the Postsecular

Tae Sung
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Charles Taylor
Derrida
empowerment
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ethics
forthcoming
gifts
Herman Melville
John Milbank
literature
Marilynne Robinson
philosophy
politics
postsecular
pragmatism
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Emerson
religion
Richard Rorty
theory
William James
Younghill Kang

Product details

  • ISBN 9781350572966
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 26 Nov 2026
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Description

Offering a postsecular reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, Pragmatism and the Postsecular contributes to an interdisciplinary discourse about gift theories across literary, religious, and philosophical studies.

In this study the focus is on Emerson and James' religious language of gifts. We see how they interpret the reception of gifts as dynamic sources of agency, inspiration, and empowerment-the kinds of moral sources that Charles Taylor worries might be increasingly unavailable in our secular age. Tae Sung applies a similar non-economic reading of dynamic gifts to American writers including Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, Marilynne Robinson, and Min Jin Lee. His approach reframes related debates around religious ethics (after Derrida and John Milbank) and multicultural politics (after Richard Rorty and Taylor).

Aimed at readers interested in the complex relationship between the religious and secular in the US, Sung's reading of pragmatism challenges us to reconsider how we understand gifts. The goal of such a reconsideration is to locate common ethical and political ground between secular liberalism and religious traditionalism.
About Tae Sung
Tae Sung is a Professor of English and Dean of Student Success at California Baptist University, USA. He completed his MA in theology at Fuller Seminary and his PhD in American literature and critical theory at UC Irvine where he was awarded the Strauss Fellowship in English and the Koehn Fellowship in Critical Theory for his dissertation on gift theories. He is the author of Gift: The (Im)possible Conditions of Grace in Melville’s Fiction, which appears in the volume Literature and Religious Experience (2022), and In the Way of the Gift: The Conditions of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2020).

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