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Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that their convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public discourse on religion's place in postmodern life. Postsecularism is most often associated with philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo. But it is also being explored and invented, says John A. McClure, by many novelists: Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and N. Scott Momaday among others. These novelists, who are often regarded as belonging to different domains of contemporary fiction, are fleshing out the postsecular issues that scholars treat more abstractly. But the modes of belief elaborated in these novels and the new narrative forms synchronized with these modes are dramatically partial and open-ended. Postsecular fiction does not aspire to any full \"mapping\" of the reenchanted cosmos or any formal moral code, nor does it promise anything like full redemption. It is partial in another sense as well: it is emphatically dedicated to progressive ideals of social transformation and well-being, in repudiation of resurgent fundamentalist prescriptions for the same.

This article describes romantic vitalism as a postsecular tradition of energy mysticism and traces its elaboration over the last two centuries. It identifies a tension in vitalist thinking, which can tend either toward unregulated self-assertion or toward the proposition that “everything that lives is holy” and deserving of respect. This tension emerges in Blake, Whitman, and Nietzsche. And it distinguishes two of the most important literary manifestos of mid-twentieth century America, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Kerouac’s On the Road. Published in 1957 and immediate bestsellers, these works suggest an America divided by its allegiance to contradictory forms of vitalism.

Some of the most celebrated contemporary US fiction captures the current situation of spiritual engagement, uncertainty and experimentation. McClure examines the state of postmodernism in terms of a religious revival, with its resurgence of spiritual energies, discourses and commitments.

A number of gifted novelists depict religious awakenings that synthesize sacred and secular ways of seeing, affirm the preciousness of the world, and dramatize visions of human possibility. McClure critiques several of these novels, focusing particularly on Don DeLillo's \"The Names.\"

A discrimination of mysteries Like many postmodern novelists, Don DeLillo plays seriously with the forms of popular fiction. He draws regularly on the forensic plotlines of detective mysteries and espionage fiction. Who is plotting to blow up the New York Stock Exchange (Players) (1977)? Who has the film of Adolf Hitler's last days (Running Dog) (1978)? For whom is James Axton really working (The Names) (1982)? Who has Dylar, the drug that supposedly represses the fear of death (White Noise) (1985)? Who killed JFK (Libra) (1988)? The plots of esoteric fiction, filled with quests for secret knowledge and cosmic conspiracies, also fascinate him. The Names features a search for a secret cult obsessed with obscure languages and ritual murder, and Libra muses, as its title indicates, over the secrets encoded in the esoteric systems of astrology. In these popular narrative traditions, all mysteries are for solving, all disruptive forces can be managed, and human dignity is closely linked to the acquisition of exact knowledge.But DeLillo is preoccupied as well with a third and very different discourse of mystery. Many of his novels – including Players, The Names, White Noise, Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997) – climax in dramatic episodes of worshipful communion that recall the religious “mysteries” of DeLillo's Catholic heritage. In these episodes characters unfulfilled by quests for knowledge and control or by practices of privileged superficiality find comfort in experiences of sacramental communion that recall the “mysteries” of the Catholic sacraments, sacred practices that channel grace to those who perform them from sources that cannot be fully understood.

In focusing on this transformation of Buddhist ideas in the contemporary context, it also helps us place the writers it studies within a larger tradition of innovation sometimes called postsecularism. [...] the study will be of real interest to several audiences: students of the history of Buddhism's migration to America; of what might best be called, following David McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism, modernist (and postmodernist) movements in Buddhism; of postsecular literature more generally, and finally, of course, of the authors under discussion.

McClure reviews \"The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire\" by Christopher GoGwilt.