The first book in any language that collects scholarly essays on Kierkegaard’s beautiful and vital Lily Discourses.
Long branded as “merely” devotional writings, Kierkegaard’s texts dealing with the lilies and birds spoken of in Matthew’s gospel are rich with poetic nuance and philosophical significance. In Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel, a diverse group of emerging and established interpreters addresses the religious, literary and dramatic aspirations of the philosopher in these discourses. Kierkegaard employs the figures of the lily and the bird to convey both suffering and pleasure, the fleeting nature of experience and the search to endow this very transience with enduring significance. In the process, they identify and develop a philosophy of language—and of exemplarity—crucial to all of Kierkegaard’s writings. To ask what the lily and bird teach is also to ask what it means, or could mean, to be human. This collection of essays is pivotal in registering, clarifying and celebrating Kierkegaard’s own response to that question suspended at the heart of his Lily Discourses.
The range of perspectives and approaches represented in this volume testifies to the wide appeal of this new and exciting area of Kierkegaard research, from analytic aesthetics to eco-theology. Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel is the go-to text for anyone looking to teach or write about the Lily Discourses across the disciplines of philosophy, literary studies and religion.
Preface, Frances Maughan-Brown (College of the Holy Cross, USA) and Rick Anthony Furtak (Colorado College, USA)
Part I: The Lily and the Bird
1. The Remains: Let it be Lily, Frances Maughan-Brown (College of the Holy Cross, USA)
2. Considering the Birds of the Air: Winged Creatures of Uncertainty and Belief, Rick Anthony Furtak (Colorado College, USA)
Part II: On Reading
3. On Beginning and Listening in Kierkegaard’s The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Iben Damgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
4. The Temptation of Ambiguity, Elizabeth X. Li (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
5. Prudence and Openness in Kierkegaard’s Lilies and Birds, Erin Plunkett (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
6. The Music of the Poet and the Sounds of the Lily and the Bird, Elisabete M. de Sousa (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Part III: Either/Or Again
7. Repeating Either/Or?, George Pattison (University of Glasgow, UK)
8. From “the Starry Heavens Above” to “the Lily of the Field”, Marcia Robinson (Syracuse University, USA)
9. Taming the Troll: Kierkegaard on Self-Torment, Aestheticism, and Faith, Genia Schönbaumsfeld (University of Southampton, UK)
10. Kierkegaard on Natural and Artistic Beauty, Antony Aumann (University of Northern Michigan, USA)
Part IV: Between Two Virtues
11. Contentment and Discontentment with Being Human, Adam Buben (Leiden University, the Netherlands)
12. Creaturely Agency: Clarifying Kierkegaard’s Notion of Contentment, Dante J. Clementi (University of Saint Andrews, UK)
13. The Unconditioned Obedience of the Lily and Bird, Sergia Hay (Pacific Lutheran University, USA)
14. Kierkegaard's Charitable Misanthropy, Ulrika Carlsson (Independent Scholar, USA)
Part V: The Imperative
15. The Inversion of Human Exceptionalism: Kierkegaard’s Imago Dei Read Ecologically, Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal (University of Cambridge, UK)
16. On Becoming a Humus Being, Jason A. Mahn (Augustana College, USA)
17. Taking Care: Of Kierkegaard’s Incomparable Lily Discourses, Kevin Newmark (Boston College, USA)
Index
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