4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

8. Disgrace is read in its relation to numerous unacknowledged narrative influences, including Richardsons Clarissa and Tolstoys Resurrection.

This introduction marks out the space of the following volume, as it takes its bearings from David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy and explores its implications through various sacred modes of being. It sets out the terms of a now questioned antagonism between religion and the secular by looking at a renewed relationship, as reconstituted by the postsecular, between religion and theology. It suggests that theology, as a cultural practice, must now reckon not only with the secular but also with an increasingly contested religious conception, and it does so through the concept of the sacred. In looking at how the sacred has been recently modulated through such theorists as Girard and Agamben, and then through the poetics of Rilke and Nietzsche, a new understanding emerges, one in which theology takes on, necessarily, a cultural mode, and culture, necessarily, a theological mode. The contributing chapters are then positioned around these modes, to suggest and exemplify, in their interdisciplinary approach, a new sense of living and dwelling in the sacred.

I introduce the dilemma of monotheistic intolerance in the context of religious violence and the concerns about the limits of liberalism and liberal violence. I then introduce Jan Assmann, René Girard, and Chantal Mouffe as figures useful in reconceptualizing our notions of intolerance, pluralism, and monotheism.

Chapter 3 begins the introduction to Jan Assmann through material that is shared between him and Girard: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. This text stepped into a multi-century discourse that tried to abolish the monotheistic distinction between “Israel” vs. “Egypt.” But, contrary to simplistic readings of Freud as the enemy of religion, he ultimately argues (with mixed veracity) that monotheistic intolerance is a beneficial “progress in intellectuality.” This introduces much of Assmann’s topics: that is, comparing monotheism between Akhenaten and Egypt, Moses and Israel, and theorizing monotheism’s relationship to violence and politics.

In Chapter 2, I introduce Girard’s mimetic theory with emphasis on his understanding of gods, “the victim mechanism,” and monotheism. What does it mean that monotheism interrupts archaic polytheistic religion by dividing God from the victim? This invites us to venture out into other monotheistic scholarship, like Assmann’s and its Freudian roots.

Chapter 7 conceptualizes how, if monotheism “separates” God from the political sphere this does not result in what Mouffe denounced as depoliticization. I examine Christ as manifesting the monotheistic “separation” from the political sphere while agonistically engaging the mechanisms of scapegoating. In Christ the victimized-divinity we do not have a regression into polytheism; nor yet do we find an “escape” from the sacrifice and exclusion that polytheism contained. Rejecting both as insufficient, I consider Girard’s paradox that Christianity is an “exit from religion in the form of a demythified religion.” Drawing cues from Mouffe’s critiques of liberalism, I see in monotheism not an escape from intolerance into an exclusion-free utopia, but something more like exclusion-in-reverse in which intolerance is a photographic negative. I thus illustrate Christ as embodying a monotheism that – precisely through, not despite, his intolerance – points us toward the marginalized other and pluralistic concerns today.

The Conclusion ties the themes of the book together to emphasize monotheism not as an "identity forged negatively against the other," nor as an escape from this othering. Rather, through the apophatic intolerance explored in all chapters, monotheism is conceived as othering-in-reverse, as a revelation of our blindness to scapegoating the other, highlighting our need not for mere inclusivity but agonistic pluralism.