In everyday and more specialized contexts, then, tragedy is a powerful term that can serve as a veil concealing difficult truths or as a lever of critique. If people turn to the literary realm and bracket off general understandings of the tragic from a more focused discussion of tragedy as a dramatic form, they wonder what they understand tragedy to be and what its properties and conditions of possibility are. For some critics, like George Steiner, tragedy is unthinkable in modernity. He argues that it cannot be meaningfully written now, its "death" heralded by modernity's loss of belief in the gods. Perhaps few now accept Steiner's views, but his work raises the question of whether tragedy is an invariant form and whether it requires certain conditions, like a belief in the transcendental, for its flourishing. Here, Foley and Howard discuss the urgency of tragedy now.