The postsecular has emerged out of different contexts, perhaps since the early 1980's. The list below covers the principle fields which have contributed to the softening of secular reservations about the spiritual life.

Postsecular contexts include:

• the 'new' sciences of quantum mechanics, relativity and chaos (complexity) theory, which challenge the deterministic, mechanistic and reductionist worldview
• the emerging field of consciousness studies
• transpersonal psychology from Jung to Wilber
• sections of Postmodern thinking including Heidegger and Levinas
• sections of Christian theology, in particular the 'Radical Orthodoxy', inspired by Postmodernism
• the creative arts in the 20th C, for example artists from Brancusi to Bill Viola who have explored a wide range of conventional and unconventional spiritualities in their art
• mystical approaches to Nature, from Thoreau to Dillard