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In 1872, a young novice, Sister Marie, appeared at the door of the private study of Napoleon Perche, archbishop of New Orleans. This was not Sister Marie's first visit to the archbishop's residence. As a member of the religious order “last in rank” in the city, she was regularly called on to perform housekeeping duties for the archbishop and had worked for him in this capacity first as a postulant and later as a novice. Today, the reason for her visit was different: she appeared before him for the first time in a religious habit, which her order's mother superior, Josephine Charles, had designed and made. Mother Josephine was one of three founders of the Soeurs de Sainte-Famille or Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF), the order lowest in rank in New Orleans because its members were women of African descent.

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For all its unfashionable teleological inevitability, its brash aspirations to universality, the story of advancing secularization remains the one progress narrative to which professional literary study typically attaches its own discourses and aims. Michael Kaufmann urges literary scholars to bring critical scrutiny to bear on the ostensibly closed (if embattled) narrative of secularization in the interest of revisiting normative assumptions that have shaped and constrained the development of professional identity. Underscoring Kaufmann's call, Fessenden looks beyond the institutional grounding of literary studies to consider broader political consequences of leaving the religion/secular binary unexamined and undisturbed. In particular, she notes the problematic deference religion receives when its relation to the secular is mapped onto a familiar liberal model of private and public domains.

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