Kierkegaard Religion And The Nineteenth Century Crisis Of Culture

Kierkegaard is often viewed in the history of ideas solely within the academic traditions of philosophy and theology. The secondary literature generally ignores the fact that he also took an active role in the public debate about the significance of the modern age that was taking shape in the flourishing feuilleton literature during the period of his authorship. Through a series of sharply focussed studies, George Pattison contextualises Kierkegaard's religious thought in relation to the debates about religion, culture and society carried on in the newspapers and journals read by the whole educated stratum of Danish society. Pattison brings Kierkegaard into relation to not only high art and literature but also to the ephemera of his contemporary culture. This has important implications for our understanding of Kierkegaard's view of the nature of religious communication in modern society.

This book situates Kierkegaard in the nineteenth-century debates which influenced him and discusses his relevance to contemporary Christian theology.

This study engages in a detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s works of literary and dramatic criticism, including those works directed at interpreting Kierkegaard’s own authorship, with a specific concern for both what Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard’s anonyms and pseudonyms write about the nature and practice of authorship, as well as how the Kierkegaardian authors practice authorship themselves. Moving through five chapters, each devoted to one or more works of Kierkegaard’s criticism, the study develops a new approach to reading Kierkegaard – a new Kierkegaardian hermeneutic – that begins always with the character of the author. This new approach avoids the challenges of critics of biographical criticism, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, by positing the author always as a work of fiction him- or herself, the creation of an unknown and ever anonymous “author of the author”.

The standing of the Danish philosopher and religious thinker S¿ren Kierkegaard has gone up in recent years. Yet because he regarded communication as being as much about self-concealment as about self-revelation, he can still seem a forbidding and difficult figure. The deliberate ambiguity of Kierkegaard, in which he set out to repel as much as to attract his readers, is here explored by George Pattison, who gives full attention to the scandalous element of the philosopher's work, and does not shy away from his ambivalent attitudes towards sexuality, the body, marriage, and the family. This book is unlike other nontechnical introductions to Kierkegaard in that it does not seek to promote one part of Kierkegaard's writings over others, but offers, rather, a perspective on his life and output as a whole. That Kierkegaard grappled in his own age with many of the problems which beset our own, and frequently offered fascinating responses to those problems, is a major incentive to examine his thought today. By placing Kierkegaard in the context of a "crisis of faith"and making valuable connections between events in the philosopher's life and the development of his thinking, the author of this timely, readable, and attractively written study has produced a book which should be of interest to a wide nonspecialist readership.

The Danish Golden Age of the first half of the nineteenth century endured in the midst of a number of different kinds of crisis — political, economic, and cultural. The many changes of the period made it a dynamic time, one in which artists, poets, philosophers, and religious thinkers were constantly reassessing their place in society. This book traces the different aspects of the cultural crisis of the period through a series of case studies of key figures, including Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Søren Kierkegaard. Far from just a historical analysis, however, the book shows that many of the key questions that Danish society wrestled with during the Golden Age remain strikingly familiar today. Jon Stewart is associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen.

This study shows how Kierkegaard's mature theological writings reflect his engagement with the wide range of theological positions which he encountered as a student, including German and Danish Romanticism, Hegelianism and the writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher. George Pattison draws on both major and lesser-known works to show the complexity and nuances of Kierkegaard's theological position, which remained closer to Schleiermacher's affirmation of religion as a 'feeling of absolute dependence' than to the Barthian denial of any 'point of contact', with which he is often associated. Pattison also explores ways in which Kierkegaard's theological thought can be related to thinkers such as Heidegger and John Henry Newman, and its continuing relevance to present-day debates about secular faith. His volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of philosophy and theology.

Simon D. Podmore claims that becoming a self before God is both a divine gift and an anxious obligation. Before we can know God, or ourselves, we must come to a moment of recognition. How this comes to be, as well as the terms of such acknowledgment, are worked out in Podmore's powerful new reading of Kierkegaard. As he gives full consideration to Kierkegaard's writings, Podmore explores themes such as despair, anxiety, melancholy, and spiritual trial, and how they are broken by the triumph of faith, forgiveness, and the love of God. He confronts the abyss between the self and the divine in order to understand how we can come to know ourselves in relation to a God who is apparently so wholly Other.

Kierkegaard’s Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard’s writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard’s thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard’s contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.