Pragmatism and the Postsecular

Offering a postsecular reading of pragmatists 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, Younghill Kang, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson. 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.