Kierkegaard portrays his role as an author with the image of a prompter in “An Occasional Discourse” of 1847. A prompter in the theatre whispers not his own words, but a text by someone else already familiar to the actors on stage. This raises the question as to which text Kierkegaard is prompting. I seek to answer the question through a close reading of his imagery of authorial withdrawal in this discourse in connection with his repeated description of his writings (...) as readings of the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers. (shrink)

Kierkegaard dismissed the quest for the historical Jesus that dominated historical‐critical biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century. Instead of historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus, he embarked on polyphonic rewritings of the story of the life of Jesus from still new perspectives. This chapter investigates how Kierkegaard's different narrations of the “life of Jesus” inscribe the New Testament texts and imitate their narrative art, particularly the role of dramatic irony, in relation to Kierkegaard's metareflections on how to communicate this (...) story in a modern age. (shrink)

This article critically examines and discusses the charge, raised by Adorno in his essay on Works of Love, that Kierkegaard’s rewriting of the Gospel story of the good Samaritan reduces neighbor love to abstract inwardness. It has been somewhat ignored in the reception of Adorno’s text that he also praises Kierkegaard as a critic of his time. I explore Adorno’s appreciation of this dimension in Works of Love and seek to develop it further by examining Kierkegaard’s sharp eye for discovering (...) how the inhumanity of the slavery in the past persists in more hidden and subtle ways in the modern world dominated by the instrumental rationality of economics. (shrink)

This volume reconsiders the relation between visibility and transcendence. The focus is on the contributions to this issue from the theological tradition in protestant Europe between the 16th and the 21st Centuries. A thematically broad field is covered embracing a plurality of methods drawn from theology, philosophy, and the theory of art. In five sub-themes the volueme deals with modes of appearing or hiding of phenomena, the fundamental understand and use of language, with the theological anthropology, the theological discourses behind (...) the religious uses of the different artistic media, and the idea of "vicarious representation"--Back cover. (shrink)