The Prayers and Tears of Paul Chan: Profane Illumination and the Post-Secular in BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER and Now promise now threat

Yates Mckee considers Paul Chan’s Tin Drum Trilogy as psychogeographical urban portraits that critically examine the roles that social conservatism and religious fundamentalism play in current global conflicts.  Aligning this endeavor with the concept of post-secularism, a ‘religion without religion’ that nonetheless perceives the presence of the spiritual in all things, Mckee frames Chan’s work as a reconsideration of the effectiveness of Enlightenment-era rationalism and its secularizing impulse by asking whether religion can ever truly be divorced from social and political practice.