Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P515
ISBN: 9780881465419
Price: $35.00
What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals.
Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question.
Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P633
ISBN: 9780881468076
Price: $35.00
EXCEPTIONALLY COMMON COURAGE provides an extended, close reading of FEAR AND TREMBLING, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous book about Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. It then fits this (in)famous work into the broader and puzzling corpus that includes both other pseudonymous works and signed discourses by this same mercurial author.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H830
ISBN: 9780881462555
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $50.00
Building on his earlier work, Ronald Green presents Kant as a major inspiration of Kierkegaard's authorship. Green argues that Kant's ethics provided the rigor on which Kierkegaard drew in developing his concept of sin. He maintains that the chief difference between Kant and Kierkegaard has to do with whether we need a historical savior to restore our broken moral wills.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H981
ISBN: 9780881467239
Price: $45.00
The essays in this volume are inspired by the influential and multi-faceted work of Jon Stewart on the historical context and subsequent legacy of Søren Kierkegaard. Following the lead of Stewart, they provide a corrective to readings that treat Kierkegaard’s texts and the works of writers influenced by him in abstraction from the specific conversations, disputes, and trends in which they were situated.
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Publisher: Mercer Universtiy Press
Product Code: P652
ISBN: 9780881468618
Price: $35.00
This collection of essays on Kierkegaard consists of various articles published in academic journals over the course of several decades. In particular, these articles seek to bring his thought into conversation with woman and gender studies in contemporary feminist philosophy and hermeneutics as well as other forms of interpretation.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P704
ISBN: 9780881469554
Price: $16.00
Reading devotionally--reading to recall sacred text in ways that call the reader to respond ethically to that text--runs contrary to reading habits of many scholars and lay readers of Søren Kierkegaard. As much as Jamie Lorentzen attends to devotional reading habits in this book, he writes for readers to whom Kierkegaard himself attended, namely, individuals navigating innately human crossroads of existence where nihilism, religious skepticism, and religious belief meet.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P474
ISBN: 9780881464627
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
In recent decades, many moral philosophers have begun to think more carefully about the significance of our inveterate story-telling habits for moral reflection. For some time those who promoted narrative’s central role for ethics on a variety of levels seemed to be commanding the field; but more recently skeptics of narrative’s relevance have begun to mount a vigorous resistance. Some of these struggles have played out on the terrain of Kierkegaard studies, and this book seeks to move the battle lines forward, both with respect to the significance of narrative more generally and to its place in Kierkegaard’s authorship.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P609
ISBN: 9780881467703
Price: $38.00
TAKING KIERKEGAARD PERSONALLY is a one-of-a-kind volume in which scholars from the world over address personal, existential lessons that Kierkegaard has taught them. Papers were selected from the June 2018 International Kierkegaard Conference, sponsored by the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. The Conference's prompt--The Wisdom of Kierkegaard: What Existential Lessons Have You Learned from Him?--compelled scholars to drop their guards and write primarily in first person narrative instead of standard third person scholarly/professorial narrative.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H769
ISBN: 9780881461268
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $30.00
From the preface:
“The Concept of Anxiety is one of Kierkegaard’s major works. It summarizes and anticipates themes that are developed in his other works, but not by presenting a unified perception. It has more the character of a work that constitutes a turning point: themes from earlier works (in particular Either/Or) are pursued in a broken way that gives a new starting point for later works. Even though The Concept of Anxiety is often an unreasonably difficult book, it is worthwhile to read as a gateway to the entire works of Kierkegaard.
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Product Code: P492
ISBN: 9780881464993
Price: $35.00
Kierkegaard's writings are severely complicated and readers often do not know what to make of them given the array of genres he deploys. He is at once a philosopher, theologian, literary critic, and poet in his own right who writes under multiple pseudonyms directed at an unsure audience.
Stages on Life's Way is one of his longer and more elusive texts, and even scholars often shy away from it. The Divine Madness of Romantic Ideals offers a close and extensive reading of this puzzling production, showing how its disarming, concrete themes of personal love and marriage help unlock more abstract conceptual boxes within Kierkegaard's authorship for a general readership, pointing out the forest while paying scrupulous attention to the trees.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P592
ISBN: 9780881467246
Price: $30.00
In an age of sharply increasing cultural polarization that has led many people to consider retreat into enclaves of the like-minded, this book seeks to persuade its readers that we need better quality conversations across ideological camps, and that the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and René Girard provide very effective tools for facilitating such conversations. The writings of Kenneth Burke are also drawn on, as an important bridge figure who influenced Girard. All three thinkers can lead us to careful reflections on the psychological and social roots of violent behavior, which is a crucially important topic in need of deeper and broader understanding.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P595
ISBN: 9780881467291
Price: $25.00
The essays and response that make up this volume were originally presented at a Symposium in Honor of Robert L. Perkins at the annual meeting of the Søren Kierkegaard Society in 2018.
These essays address Kierkegaard's political theology from a variety of perspectives, focusing on his specific views of the political and its implications for the expression of Christian love in the context of civil society in Kierkegaard's time as well as in contemporary society in America.
Contributors include: John J. Davenport, Marilyn G. Piety, C. Stephen Evans, George Pattison, Lee C. Barrett, and Christopher A. P. Nelson.
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