Posts tagged "Kierkegaard"
Emotional Protestants, Gracious Storytelling, Stressed-Out Athletes, Young Kierkegaardians, Antinomian Unicorns, and Church Basement Addictions
Addiction / Children / Conferences / Grace in Practice / Identity / Law / Philosophy / Psychology / Religion / Sports / Theology

Emotional Protestants, Gracious Storytelling, Stressed-Out Athletes, Young Kierkegaardians, Antinomian Unicorns, and Church Basement Addictions

by Mockingbird on Apr 5, 2013 • 1 Comment

We asked those who are giving “mini-talks” this Friday (4/19) at our 6th Annual Mockingbird NYC Conference to provide short teasers of what they’ll be speaking about, and they did not disappoint! If you’re looking six and a half more reasons to cancel what you have going on this weekend (or six and a half more reasons to feel silly about not doing so), look no further:

Just Watched — Up There With the Most Grace-Centered Films of the Last Few Years, If Not THE Most

1. What Does Salvation Feel Like? Protestantism and the Problem of Emotion — Simeon Zahl.…

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Mary Karr, Mini-Lives, and News From Across the (Human/Robot Divide)
Books / Grace in Practice / Identity / Law / Psychology

Mary Karr, Mini-Lives, and News From Across the (Human/Robot Divide)

by WB on Mar 27, 2013 • 3 Comments

Reading Mary Karr’s fantastic memoir Lit, one quote in particular stuck out to me as beautifully describing a tendency we humans have to fall into more limited emotional ranges:

…anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement.

I don’t want to read into Karr’s emotional experiences, but for me this passage elucidates the emotional life lived in times when the Law, or demand to achieve, is…

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Five Golden…Themes! What We Just Couldn’t Get Enough of in 2012
America / Everyday / Film / Identity / Music / News / Politics / Psychology / Relationships / Sports / Technology / Theology / TV

Five Golden…Themes! What We Just Couldn’t Get Enough of in 2012

by Ethan Richardson on Dec 14, 2012 • 4 Comments

One of Mockingbird’s most distinctive features is the repetition. Like Christmas itself, we’re trying to point that one “old, old story,” that ancient theme, as we see it dug up time and again. It’s dug up in all sorts of places, of course, from 18th century poetry archives to slasher films, from church basements to top-tier corporate office towers. But it’s still resonating a singular focus–the Gospel–from these unforeseen, albeit obscure, sources.

Despite the wide-spanning scopes and intentions of some of our favorite “news” sources, the same thing unwittingly tends to happen. After all, reporting the news means telling and retelling…

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One-Way Love According to Søren Kierkegaard
Books / Grace in Practice / Philosophy

One-Way Love According to Søren Kierkegaard

by Todd Brewer on Aug 3, 2012 • 1 Comment

A bit of a follow-up to last week’s fantastic post on Kierkegaard and imputation. It’s doozy of a quote on perfect, one-way, love:

“To be able to love a person despite his weaknesses and defects and imperfections is still not perfect love, but rather this, to be able to find him lovable despite and with his weaknesses and defects and imperfections. Let us understand each other. It is one thing fastidiously to want to eat only the choicest and most delectable dish when it is exquisitely prepared or, even when this is the case, fastidiously to find one or another defect…

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Kierkegaard on Erotic Love, Divine Sorrow and True Imputation
Forgiveness / Identity / Philosophy / Theology

Kierkegaard on Erotic Love, Divine Sorrow and True Imputation

by WB on Jul 26, 2012 • 8 Comments

We’re embarking on one of Kierkegaard’s bizarre thought-experiments here, on the love of God in Christ. It’s anthropomorphic, it’s controversial, and it’s all possibly a crock of you-know-what…but it’s deeply moving and, to this blogger’s mind, it brings out some brilliant aspects of God’s love and imputation’s reality.

God’s eternal motive with regard to man is to make His love understood – just to communicate it, in the same way a romantic feels compulsion to send a love letter or an avid fan absolutely must praise the author of a book or song. God’s love for us compels him to make that…

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Nobody Knows Yourself When You’re Down and Out: Kierkegaard on the Mirage of Health
Books / Psychology / Religion / Suffering / Theology / Theology/Religion

Nobody Knows Yourself When You’re Down and Out: Kierkegaard on the Mirage of Health

by WB on Jun 4, 2012 • 2 Comments

From his Sickness unto Death, a passage where Kierkegaard compares spiritual sickness – i.e. despair – to physical unhealth, and then diagnoses seemingly everyone with a degree of this condition, even those who believe themselves healthy:

This observation will no doubt strike many as paradoxical, an exaggeration, and a gloomy and discouraging view besides. Yet it is none of these things. It is not gloomy; on the contrary it tries to shed light on what one generally banishes to a certain obscurity…Commonly a person is assumed to be healthy if he himself doesn’t say that he is ill; even more so…

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S. Kierkegaard on the Anxiety of Alienation and Dizziness of Freedom
Philosophy / Psychology / Suffering

S. Kierkegaard on the Anxiety of Alienation and Dizziness of Freedom

by Blair on Mar 29, 2012 • 2 Comments

Somewhat recently, Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, authored a piece for The NY Times on Søren Kierkegaard’s experience with anxiety entitled, “Kierkegaard, Danish Doctor of Dread.” The subject here being a man who once described his pervasive dread in the following terms:

“All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable, I most of all; to me all existence is infected, I most of all. My distress is enormous, boundless; no one knows it…

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Kierkegaard, the Preacher Within, and His Hiding Place
Forgiveness / Law / Philosophy

Kierkegaard, the Preacher Within, and His Hiding Place

by Ethan Richardson on Feb 23, 2012 • No Comments

From Discourses at the Communion on Fridays:

I would make no attempt to dismay men, being myself only too much dismayed; but whosoever thou art, even if thou art, humanly speaking, almost pure and blameless, when this privy preacher preaches before thee in thine inward man, thou also dost feel what others perhaps sense with more dismay–thou also dost find a need to hide thyself, and though it had been told thee a thousand times, and a thousand times again, that it is impossible to find this hiding-place, thou yet art sensible of the need. Oh, would it were possible for…

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Does The “Age of Anxiety” Ever End?
America / Grace in Practice / News / Psychology / Social Science / Suffering

Does The “Age of Anxiety” Ever End?

by Blair on Jan 25, 2012 • 3 Comments

I’ve been a rather anxious person for most of my short (thus far) life. I was anxious about grades while in middle school, I was anxious about getting into college while in high school, and I was anxious about getting a job while a senior in college. Today, I’m anxious about an ever-lengthening “to-do” list that never seems to diminish. Tonight, I’m guessing I’ll be anxious about getting up early to go the gym. That being said, an article written by Daniel Smith (author of an anxiety-focused website, The Monkey Mind Chronicles) on what some have called our “Age of…

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Dexter, Retributive Justice, and Knights of Faith
America / Law / Philosophy / Religion / Science / TV

Dexter, Retributive Justice, and Knights of Faith

by Ethan Richardson on Nov 1, 2011 • 1 Comment

NPR has picked up on a strand of Dexter‘s sixth season that is asking all the right kinds of questions. The show, which stars Michael C. Hall as Dexter, imagines a killer gone karma, a criminal who (now) exacts justice by principle, killing killers to keep them from killing the innocents. The premise itself seems to make very non-Christian value judgments on the world, mainly that there are killers and non-killers, that there are those who act by principle and those who do not, that there is a universal ethic to which all are accountable and by which few miss…

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The Weaker, the Stronger, According to Kierkegaard
Theology

The Weaker, the Stronger, According to Kierkegaard

by Ethan Richardson on Oct 27, 2011 • 2 Comments

From “Joyful Notes in the Strife of Suffering,” within Christian Discourses:

That God is the strongest is evidenced by one sign, that man is entirely weak. For God there is but one obstacle, man’s selfishness, which steps in between God and man like the shadow of the earth when it produces the eclipse of the moon. If there is this selfishness, then man is strong, but his strength is God’s weakness; if the selfishness is absent, then man is weak, and God strong; the weaker man becomes, the stronger God becomes.

However, if this is so, then in another sense, in the…

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Another Week Ends: Christian Neurotics, Shrieking Children, Grunge-Love, Steve Jobs, and Idiot Brothers
America / Children / Film / Music / News / Psychology / Reviews / Suffering / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Christian Neurotics, Shrieking Children, Grunge-Love, Steve Jobs, and Idiot Brothers

by Ethan Richardson on Aug 26, 2011 • No Comments

At week’s end, despite the continued reverberations, ironic photo blogs, and miraculous happenings, all is still in post-quake Central Virginia! The Mockingbird offices remain in functional tact…

1) Over at First Things, and similarly confronting the stigmas of mental health as discussed in an earlier post this week, “The Christian Neurotic” ponders “neurosis” and its impact (good and bad) upon one’s grasp on the dual nature of reality, that is, one fraught with despair and yet, in the framework of Christian belief, tinged with hope:

The psychological conflict of living in two cultures at once can be overbearing. However, it should also…

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