Culture and Transcendence

The spectrum of religious experience and spirituality in contemporary
postmodern, postsecular and religiously pluralized Western culture is
extremely broad. Is it possible to trace the development, the shifts,
breaches and patterns of religious and spiritual transcendence in this
deeply diversified context? In this volume, a heuristic model of four
types of transcendence is proposed and discussed. The four types are
immanent transcendence, radical transcendence, radical immanence and
transcendence as alterity. Of each type two examples from contemporary
cultural discourses, ranging from theology and philosophy to popular
culture are presented and the viability of the model as such is
critically assessed. The pairs of examples show how different kinds of
content are given to the same type. By illuminating this dialectic
between formal categories of notions of transcendence and their specific
content in various areas of culture, the book can aid further
exploration of the preconditions, possibilities, difficulties and
limitations of relating to and expressing (a) sense(s) of transcendence
within a postmodern world.