George Pattison

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 brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore Kierkegaard's continuing relevance to political and social issues. Kierkegaard is often portrayed as an out-and-out individualist with no concern for interpersonal relations. These essays not only refute this caricature, they bring out the complex nature of Kierkegaard's engagements with questions of selfhood and society. What Kierkegaard has to say about love, the church, politics and justice is shown to test the limits of what we take for granted in the modern (and postmodern) world.

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.

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.

This paper explores Kierkegaard's journals and papers for the year 1838, with a focus on his religious development in this year, his relationship with his father, and his early response to Hegelianism. A closer examination of the materials shows that the journals are, in fact, an extremely problematic source in each area, often requiring the supplement of later, published work. Still questions remain open, but several myths about the young Kierkegaard are shown to be of dubious value. /// O presente artigo explora os diários e os manuscritos de Kierkegaard referentes ao ano de 1838, focalizando a sua atenção no desenvolvimento religioso de Kierkegaard durante esse ano, bem como nas suas relações com o próprio pai e nas suas primeiras respostas ao Hegelianismo. O autor do artigo demonstra que um exame atento dos materiais acaba por revelar os mesmos como fonte problemática de informação em cada uma dessas áreas, exigindo, por isso, serem suplementados com referências a textos escritos e publicados mais tarde. Apesar de haver importantes questões que têm de permanecer em aberto, o presente artigo demonstra o carácter duvidoso de alguns dos mitos em circulação sobre o jovem Kierkegaard.

This book is a collection of essays by an international group of scholars, concentrating on issues of aesthetics and communication in Kierkegaard's writing. The contributors explore the constant and complex interaction in his authorship between medium and message, author, authority and reader, text and transcendence, reading and misreading. With constant reference to the religious thrust of his work, Kierkegaard is treated both as an important contributor to the theoretical discussion of communication and as a gifted literary practitioner. The perspectives are varied, and the contributors bring a range of special interests to bear on their interpretation of Kierkegaard: from Old Testament studies to opera, from theological hermeneutics to Nietzsche and contemporary feminism. There is, not surprisingly, no easy consensus, but there is a recognition of the style and form of Kierkegaard's writing - or, to use his own expression, 'the HOW' of communication - as being decisive for his significance for us today.

This chapter reiterates the point that thinking about God as a counter-movement to technology is not the same as rejecting technology, but as contributing to the attempt to live humanly with technology. The idea of God explored in the book is of God as free and giving freedom, as the one who is pure possibility and yet a possible object of active remembrance within the movement of historical time. However, the question remains open whether this God will be identical to the God of Christian faith.

When we compare a thinker as complex and many–sided as Søren Kierkegaard with a cultural phenomenon as significant as Zen Buddhism it is unlikely that we will be able to come up with any simple formula by which to summarize the results of the comparison. But the value of such comparative studies need not in any case lie in the conclusions we reach but in the intrinsic interest and importance of the material itself, in the questions and insights raised by both similarities and dissimilarities. All this is still true if we confine the field of comparison to a very specific area, as here, where we are concerned with the relationship between art and religion in Kierkegaard and Zen. For this is of course no marginal issue: the distinction between the aesthetic and the religious is fundamental to the whole structure of Kierkegaard's authorship while the arts provde one of the main manifestations of the spirit of Zen. Our line of enquiry may be narrow but it takes us straight to the heart of the matter and the questions which it raises are crucial to the overall assessment of both Kierkegaard and Zen and of the relationship between them

Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his work. The aim of this collection is not to abstract Dostoevsky's religious 'teaching' from his literary works, but to explore the interaction between his Christian faith and his writing. The essays cover such topics as temptation, grace and law, Dostoevsky's use of the gospels and hagiography, Trinitarianism, and the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser-known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree.

Existentialism was one of the most important influences on 20th century thought, especially in the period between the 1920s and early 1960s. Best known in its atheistic representatives such as Sartre, it also numbered many significant religious thinkers. This text is a critical introduction to these religious existentialists, who are treated as a coherent group in their own right and not merely derivative of secular existentialism. The book argues that they constitute a distinctive religious voice that continues to merit attention in an era of postmodernity.