Word: kierkegaard
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What original sin comes down to, suggests Vanderbilt Theologian Ray Hart, "is that you can count on man to be a bastard." In a century that has so far produced Hiroshima, Buchenwald and Biafra, this is an insight that is hard to ignore. Søren Kierkegaard described original sin as a sense of dread; for most of mankind, it is still an uncomfortably familiar feeling...
...Basel, Switzerland. Jaspers was a trained psychiatrist with deep spiritual convictions and a profound faculty for logic. Yet he considered science, religion, and reason incapable of elucidating man's complexities, holding that man can only grasp his authentic Being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life. Like Kierkegaard, Jaspers embraced the Judeo-Christian belief that "however minute a quantity the individual may be among the factors that make history, he is a factor." Such inwardly directed views led him in 1947 to write The Question of German Guilt, which outraged many of his countrymen for its theme of collective...
...natural virtue by organized society. On the whole, Romantic feeling has been a social outcast, preserved by poets and writers, celebrated unwittingly by ordinary men. The rational approach assumes that anything, including God, that cannot be proved to exist, does not exist. One essentially Romantic reply in religion was Kierkegaard's assertion that man must leap into faith, as into darkness, with no reassuring proof that God exists. Another response was modern Existentialism. In what it gloomily concedes is now a mechanistic world, it seeks to restore man's sense of individual vitality and will by urging...
...believe in Christ has always been, as Kierkegaard put it, an inexplicable leap of faith. The most profound preacher of that mystery in the 20th century was Karl Barth, who died last week at the age of 82. Eulogized as the century's most significant religious thinker, Barth changed the course of Protestant theology in his lifetime almost singlehandedly. Though he abhorred theological systems, he produced, in his 14-volume Church Dogmatics, the most powerful exposition of Protestant thought since Calvin's Institutes...
...rarely gives interviews, shuns Parisian literary circles-Cioran is hardly better known in Europe than in the U.S. Yet there are impressive testimonials to his significance. Critic Susan Sontag, in her introduction to The Temptation to Exist, calls him "the most distinguished figure writing today in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein." And Nobel prizewinning poet, Saint-John Perse, hails Cioran as "one of the greatest French writers to honor our language since the death of Paul Valery. His lofty thought is one of the most rigorous, independent and interesting in Europe today...