The Pursuit of Pain: Reclaiming Belief from the Secular in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “The Five Wounds”

Abstract: This essay extends recent scholarship on the secular as an epistemological and ontological foundation for understanding representations of religion in modern literature. It argues that, in “The Five Wounds,” Kirstin Valdez Quade imagines characters whose willingness to suffer pain embodies a form of belief that does not com-port with the norms of religion in a secular world but rather reclaims a more robust mode of belief as an ongoing pursuit of trust and virtue. The story thus represents an emerging current in U.S. literature that seeks to embody faith in ways irreducible to a secular social order altogether.