Abstract
This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic postsecularity in western nations that encroach across the globe. Postsecularity accounts for the resurgence of a religious consciousness in the face of challenges to secularity in the forms of accommodating minority religions; the yearning for spiritual expression as an antidote to capitalist materialism; and posthuman concerns about the engineering of biological human identities, artificial intelligence, and anthropogenic climate crises. Poetry, with its non-verbal cues, can both animate and also reach beyond the purely rational discourses of philosophy. Accordingly, poems by T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy span a century of thought and literary evocations of the interstices and crossovers of theocentric belief and unbelief. They illuminate the postsecular elements of partial faith, spiritual plurality, and resacralization. These elements disrupt binary polarizations of atheism and faith.
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12 October 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00886-w
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The original online version of this article was revised: In this article the title was incorrectly given as ‘Living Without God: Multicultural Spectrums of the Atheist/Nastika: Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy’ but should have been ‘Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy’.
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Dowson, J. Postsecularity and the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy. SOPHIA 60, 735–745 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00849-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00849-1