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Religious protest, such as the protest that Job expresses, reveals the manners in which believers experience the absurd while hanging on to God. The purpose of this article is to explore the “grammar” of this paradoxical faith stance by bringing Kierkegaard and Camus to bear upon it, and thereby to show the “family resemblance” between Job, Camus’s “absurd man,” and the Kierkegaardian believer. I begin with a discussion of experiences of the absurd that give rise to religious protest. I then turn to Kierkegaard to explore the manners in which “faith’s thought” renders the “experience of the absurd” a religious one, while pushing the believer further into the absurd. I end with a discussion of Job as an absurd rebel in Camus’s sense.

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\".

In his 1843–1844 Upbuilding Discourses on patience, Søren Kierkegaard makes the claim that one gains one’s soul in patience. Philosophically speaking, this claim seems to be a meshing together of two unrelated topics: the virtue of patience, which usually falls under moral philosophy, and the topic of the soul, which belongs to metaphysics or religious discourse. Rather than interpreting Kierkegaard’s talk about the soul as merely poetic or religious rather than properly philosophical, in this essay I attempt to take his connection between the virtue of patience and the constitution of the person seriously. I do so by arguing that the constitutive elements of the Kierkegaardian self can be understood hermeneutically as a proto-fundamental ontology. I then identify how Kierkegaard describes the virtue of patience in distinctly hermeneutical terms not as qualities or traits that adhere to the person but as a particular way of inhabiting space and time in relation to God. In patience, the self remains rooted in the present, bearing the weight of the loss and lack therein, while maintaining an anticipatory openness toward the future—a future that ultimately only God can provide. Patience, I conclude, is a way of being in time that is necessary at the constitutive level of the hermeneutical self.

Concerns about the dangers of social comparison emerge in multiples places in Kierkegaard’s authorship. I argue that these concerns—and his critique of the role of “the public”—take on a new relevance in the digital age. In this article, I focus on one area where concerns about the risks of social comparison are paramount: the contemporary debate about moral grandstanding or “virtue-signaling”. Neil Levy and Evan Westra have recently attempted to defend virtue-signaling against Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke’s critique. I argue that these defences fail and that a consideration of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers is critical to seeing why. The over-confidence to which they give rise exacerbates certain vices with the potential to do moral, social and epistemic harm: I focus in particular on self-righteousness (complementing Kierkegaard’s discussion of envy). I then argue that Kierkegaard’s contrast between the religious category of the “single individual”—the genuine person of “character”—and the person who effectively appeals to the authority of some version of “the public” deepens our understanding of why we should reject defences of virtue-signaling. It helps us to distinguish between two kinds of virtue-signaler (“superficial enthusiasts” and “clear-eyed cynics”), both of whom contribute, in different ways, to the negative impacts of the vice of self-righteousness. Contrary to Levy’s claim that virtue-signaling is virtuous, I conclude that typically it is closer to vice than to virtue.

This article will bring together the work of Soren Kierkegaard and John Wesley for the purpose of showing the relevance of their theologies for the empowerment of women. The particular focus will be on the doctrine of original sin. The paper will first address the question of why Augustine’s novel doctrine became the orthodox position and why his construction restricts its applicability to women. It will then move to Soren Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety and despair in his treatise, The Sickness Unto Death. In the theology of Soren Kierkegaard, there is room to interpret his understanding of original sin as “gendered”. For him, despair is the counterpart of original sin. It finds two forms: 1. despair is willing to be a self apart from the Power (God) that constitutes the self, and 2. despair is not willing to be a self at all. Feminists have questioned the legitimacy of original sin in its traditional form, and a few have even used Kierkegaard on the way to offering an alternative to pride. One method used here is to explicate this insight further. Another method is to put Kierkegaard and John Wesley in dialogue for the purpose of imagining selfhood for women more hopefully. If “despair” can be imagined as a wounding of the self, Wesley’s therapeutic model—seeing original sin as a disease and sanctification as its cure—has much to offer the conversation on personhood and empowered subjectivity, particularly for women. The primary research question investigated here is how a conversation between feminism, Kierkegaard, and Wesley offers an alternative to Augustine’s “orthodoxy” without rendering the idea of original sin completely untenable and useless for women within Christianity. Even though Wesley’s curative paradigm has been highlighted in more recent years, its particular strength to speak into the lives of those who do not/cannot will to be a self has perhaps yet to be fully mined. It reveals itself in the entire Wesleyan history of affirming women. However, the author believes the potential power of Wesley’s theology can be further unleashed by examining its mechanism’s in countering “female despair”.

Rethinking the powers of the imagination, Søren Kierkegaard both anticipates and challenges contemporary approaches to a descriptive philosophy of religion. In contrast to the reigning approaches to religion in his day, Kierkegaard reconceives philosophy as, first of all, descriptive of human, including specifically ethical and religious, existence. To this end, he develops conceptual tools, including a descriptive ontology of human existence, a “pluralist epistemology” exploring both cognitive and passional dimensions of religion, and a role for the poetic in philosophy, strikingly expressed in his observer figures who “imaginatively construct” “thought projects” to explore human existence. While this new descriptive account anticipates subsequent approaches to the philosophy of religion, it could be interpreted as another “objectivist” endeavor, yet Kierkegaard attempts more in this descriptive philosophy. He imaginatively deploys conceptual and rhetorical strategies maieutically to both describe and elicit self-reflection aimed at transformation, thus expanding the imagination’s uses for his readers. Comparing Kierkegaard to Pierre Hadot’s recovery of ancient Greek philosophy as “a way of life” will show how Kierkegaard also engages the particularity of “the Christian principle”, with implications for how philosophy can both describe and elicit the pathos of other religious traditions as well.

Faith, hope and love have often been classed together in the Christian tradition as the three “theological virtues”. Kierkegaard does not use that label for them, but he does have a good deal to say about all three. This paper starts by examining hope, arguing that there is an Aristotelian-style virtue relating to hope (a mean between wishful and depressive thinking) and that Kierkegaard could consistently recognize it as a secular virtue. However, his main discussions of hope as a positive state are in a religious context and relate it closely to faith and love; proper hope is a work of love and grounded in faith in God. I then argue that Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith, hope and love is, in many respects, close to Aquinas’ understanding of them as theological virtues (which differs in important ways from Aristotle’s account of a virtue) and that, therefore, it is appropriate to see Kierkegaard’s religious thought as lying within the tradition of virtue theory. The main difference between Aquinas and Kierkegaard here is that the former has an intellectualist and propositional account of faith which contrasts with the latter’s affective and existential view of it. This means that hope and love are both closer to faith for Kierkegaard than they are for Aquinas, meaning that he has a tight account of the unity of the theological virtues. I conclude by discussing how both faith and hope operate as antidotes to despair in The Sickness Unto Death.

This essay seeks to scrutinize Kierkegaard’s critical philosophical theology. The intent is to demonstrate how his religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world. Apart from the narrative on the Dane’s passionate reflections, I employ two other narratives to facilitate this inquiry into Kierkegaard. The first of these facilitating narratives comes from highlighting the work on the concept of resonance by the social theorist Hartmut Rosa. Rosa’s rich analysis of our contemporary situation provides a persuasive case for the accelerating pace of our secular world, the complex dynamics of alienation that are at play within it, and the need for social transformation that creates space for increasing resonance within personal and social relationships and structures. The second facilitating narrative centers on the notion of dancing in God, which I believe holds promise for effectively communicating moving, bodily, rhythmic, passionate, and responsive thoughts and actions concerning God’s engagement in our contemporary world. I hope to show that these three complementary discourses together provide a provocative religious discourse and vision that can prove helpful in addressing many of the challenges of our time.

Kierkegaard’s status as a virtue ethicist is a current discussion topic. Of vital importance to the question is not whether Kierkegaard’s work contains some use of virtues but where they fit in relation to his stated aims of showing someone how to become a Christian. This article seeks to demonstrate that the virtues of Thankfulness and Joy are deployed in Kierkegaard’s discourses to lead people into a relationship with God the Father. The virtues are ultimately gifts from the Triune God that lead back to a life with the Triune God. Thus, though Kierkegaard at times fits the mould of a virtue ethicist, his teleology differs in its focus on both the self and relationship with God.

This paper argues for the thesis that social comparison is, for Kierkegaard, a vice. The first part of this article reconstructs Kierkegaard’s understanding of the nature of social comparison. Here, I bring attention to his anthropological but also political and sociological observations that pertain to social comparison and its links to modernity. The second part reconstructs the moral psychological account of social comparison in Kierkegaard, drawing on some of the available secondary literature. I complement Kierkegaard’s consideration of social comparison in relation to worry and humility with his account of the non-cognitive aspects of its operationality. The third part demonstrates that social comparison is a vice. Therein, drawing on the previous sections of this article, I identify Kierkegaard’s naturalistic argument engaged to present social comparison as a non-moral and non-religious vice (functionalism), pointing toward its intermeshing with the moral religious.