Christianity And The Existentialists

"The chapters included in this volume were delivered in their original form as public lectures in Craig Chapel of Drew University during the academic year 1953-54. They comprise the fifteenth series of lectures to Christian Biography on a foundation established by President and Mrs. Ezra Squier Tipple. The selection of the participants in the lectureship followed easily upon the choice of the subject. The lecturers were assembled under a commission entitles "The Challenge of Christian Existentialism." The major motive in this title is clear. A cultural movement which is exercising so great an influence upon the reformulation of Christian thought deserves to be appraised."--Preface

"The chapters included in this volume were delivered in their original form as public lectures in Craig Chapel of Drew University during the academic year 1953-54. They comprise the fifteenth series of lectures to Christian Biography on a foundation established by President and Mrs. Ezra Squier Tipple. The selection of the participants in the lectureship followed easily upon the choice of the subject. The lecturers were assembled under a commission entitles "The Challenge of Christian Existentialism." The major motive in this title is clear. A cultural movement which is exercising so great an influence upon the reformulation of Christian thought deserves to be appraised."--Preface

This book seeks to examine the mutual interplay between existentialism and Christian belief as seen through the work of three existentialist thinkers who were also committed Christians - a Spaniard (Miguel de Unamuno), a Russian (Nikolai Berdyaev), and a Frenchman (Gabriel Marcel). They are compared with each other and with leading non-religious existentialists. The major themes studied include reason, freedom, the self, belief, hope, love, suffering, and immortality.

What was existentialism? At its heart, Noreen Khawaja argues, existentialism was an effort to translate Protestant piety into a secular philosophy. While there have been many attempts to define existentialism from within as a coherent philosophical program and even as a movement, Khawaja s book is the first study of existentialism from the standpoint of intellectual history and the first to look systematically at the role that Christianity played in the development of existential thought. Focusing on Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Khawaja illuminates the key moments in existentialism s reconstruction of Protestant piety within the confines of secular philosophy. Heidegger once described his work as an exercise in the piety of thinking. Khawaja s book shows the historical and systematic truth behind this metaphor. Notwithstanding Heidegger, thinking has not always been a pious act. But for a certain group of European intellectuals in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became so. "The Religion of Existence "will appeal to scholars of modern Christianity, philosophers, and historians of European philosophy, as well as those engaged with the theoretical and historical problems of secular and post-secular modernity. "

At the time when existentialism was a dominant intellectual and cultural force, a number of commentators observed that some of the language of existential philosophy, not least its interpretation of human existence in terms of nothingness, evoked the language of so-called mystical writers. This book takes on this observation and explores the evidence for the influence of mysticism on the philosophy of existentialism. It begins by delving into definitions of mysticism and existentialism, and then traces the elements of mysticism present in German and French thought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book goes on to make original contributions to the study of figures including Kierkegaard, Buber, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Sartre, Marcel, Camus, Weil, Bataille, Berdyaev, and Tillich, linking their existentialist philosophy back to some of the key concerns of the mystical tradition. Providing a unique insight into how these two areas have overlapped and interacted, this study is vital reading for any academic with an interest in twentieth-century philosophy, theology and religious studies.