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Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel
Essays on the Lily Discourses
Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel
Essays on the Lily Discourses
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Description
This is the first book in any language to collect scholarly essays on Kierkegaard's extraordinary series of Lily Discourses. Long considered “merely” devotional writings, the Lily Discourses constitute a sustained and repeated attempt to respond to the imperative issues in Matthew's Gospel. Kierkegaard discovers in figures of the lily and the bird a paradoxical obligation to think together, unremittingly, both suffering and joy, the fleeting nature of experience, and the effort to endow this very transience with enduring significance.
In Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel, a diverse group of emerging and established interpreters addresses the religious, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these discourses. In the process, they identify and develop a theory 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 is pivotal in registering, clarifying, and celebrating Kierkegaard's multiple responses to that question suspended at the heart of his Lily Discourses. It is the go-to text for anyone teaching or writing about the Lily Discourses across philosophy, literary studies, and religion.
Table of Contents
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
Product details
| Published | 18 Sep 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781350476547 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Series | Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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