Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue(Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society)

No thinker has reflected more deeply on the role of religion in human life than Søren Kierkegaard, who produced in little more than a decade an astonishing number of works devoted to an analysis of the kind of personality, character, and spiritual qualities needed to become an authentic human being or self. Understanding religion to consist essentially as an inward, passionate, personal relation to God or the eternal, Kierkegaard depicts the art of living religiously as a self through the creation of a kaleidoscope of poetic figures who exemplify the constituents of selfhood or the lack thereof. The present study seeks to bring Kierkegaard into conversation with contemporary empirical psychology and virtue ethics, highlighting spiritual dimensions of human existence in his thought that are inaccessible to empirical measurement, as well as challenging on religious grounds the claim that he is a virtue ethicist in continuity with the classical and medieval virtue tradition.

Table of Contents:
1. The constituents of personality; 2. Portraits of character; 3. Character and virtue; 4. Existence as a time of testing; 5. The content and formation of Christian character; 6. Progress and sanctification in the Christian life.

About the Author :
Sylvia Walsh is the author of Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (2009); Living Christianly: Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Christian Existence (2005); Living Poetically: Kierkegaard's Existential Aesthetics (1994); translator of Kierkegaard's Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (2011) and Fear and Trembling (Cambridge, 2006); and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Kierkegaard (1997). She directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers on Kierkegaard and served as president of the Søren Kierkegaard Society, co-chair of the Kierkegaard, Religion and Culture Group in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and advisory board member of International Kierkegaard Commentary.

Review :
'In this incredibly clear, sweepingly aware, and compellingly argued book, Walsh presents Kierkegaard as being most radical when at his most religious, and at his most empirically relevant when at his most existentially concerned. Although this book is primarily written for a scholarly audience, the Kierkegaard that Sylvia Walsh presents is someone that I hope all my students get to meet. And since I get to decide what goes on the syllabus, I will make sure that they do.' J. Aaron Simmons, Reading Religion