The New Immaterialism? On Spirituality in Modern Thought

Postsecular thought and criticism involves heightened attention to religious feeling as well as to religious practices. Such feeling, often described as spirituality, enjoys broad cultural currency, though it is far less frequently an object of scholarly attention in the humanities. For this reason, spirituality remains an undertheorized and widely misunderstood category in the humanities, even as it implicitly informs several sites of humanistic inquiry. The aim of this essay, therefore, is to shed light on the presence of evocatively (and sometimes overtly) spiritual thinking in humanities contexts, suggesting different ways that spirituality inflects such areas of thought as the humanities in a posthuman age, tensions between ideological and aesthetic theories, and postcritique.