Daniel Bradley

In North America, across the political spectrum, we have a strong tendency to reduce religion to nothing more than a tool to promote our own socio-political views. This is a natural consequence of our hyper-polarized culture and our impoverished view of “religion.” It is also, however, a problem—particularly for those inspired by the call to renewal through an integration of the quest for social justice and the pursuit of the spiritual life. By focusing on the value of participating in religious liturgy, I show how a renewed respect for religion can help the proponents of social justice fulfil some of the foundational desires of the original movement and, thereby, to bring to fruition some of its dormant promise. This includes, in particular, the desire for social harmony and the desire to pay greater attention to our concrete reality.

ABSTRACT In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard makes a powerful phenomenological distinction between fear and anxiety; one fears this or that thing, but one is anxious of “nothing.” Kierkegaard understands this terror before the nothing as a revelation of freedom. This is correct but incomplete. Anxiety does, indeed, transcend fear of this or that possibility to encounter possibility itself. But it also transcends guilt about this or that sin, to encounter sinfulness itself, or the general brokenness of the social injustices and cultural illusions into which we find ourselves always already thrown. We see this neglected aspect of anxiety masterfully revealed in David Lynch's, Mulholland Drive. This film opens as a typical mystery plot, but the most important clue in the film is anxiety. The anxiety, which we and ultimately the protagonist, Betty, cannot evade, reveals the inescapability of her responsibility and her guilt in a murder. However, this anxiety also points beyond her personal responsibility for the crime to a deeper understanding of the structural distortions and illusions that permeate Hollywood culture and modern life more generally. In other words, it points us beyond an existential analysis of freedom to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Returning to the plot of the film with this philosophical turn in hand helps us to see past Betty's guilt to the more important theme, the tragedy of her death.

In pointing out the strange phenomenological structure of anxiety, Kierkegaard re-opens the door to reflection on “nothingness.” This tradition has been fruitful, but it has remained wedded to interpreting this nothingness in light of the distinction between anxiety and fear. Thus, anxiety is understood exclusively as the transcendence of this or that possibility towards an encounter with the freedom of possibility itself. Kierkegaard’s original formulation, however, states that anxiety is “altogether different than fear and similar concepts.” In this article I take up Kierkegaard’s hint and argue that, interpreted in the light of guilt, his distinction is revelatory in ways that he himself did not anticipate. While we may be guilty for this or that sin, in anxiety we stand before our sinfulness itself. Anxiety ought to counsel us to be resolute in the face of possibility, but also to make a genealogical critique of our entanglement in the illusions of our past.