Word: kierkegaard
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...absurdists have heeded the admonition of their existential idol Kierkegaard, who wrote: "The comic spirit is not wild or vehement, its laughter is not shrill." Black humor has a long tradition that reached its apex in Jonathan Swift. But the humorists who dwell on death and disaster today lean too often toward the narcissistic, reflecting images of themselves as helpless heroes in a world they can neither take nor leave. Their less lugubrious colleagues, on the other hand, have been all too willing to cede the comic to the journalists and to allow the commercial to override the classic...
...greatest collection of mythology in the history of Western civilization." Students who were fundamentalists in September frequently are demythologizers by January. Some students who have no faith take the courses because they fill a genuine lack in their experience. Seven of 14 who took one Dartmouth class on Kierkegaard billed themselves as agnostics. Students who study religion as a snap generally get their heads snapped back. For a doctorate in the subject at Columbia, graduate students need a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Hebrew, besides French and German. "You don't get marks for piety," says Stanford...
...ever begged him to grow up, and he never did. He traveled with a child's restless, wide-eyed curiosity. "Oh what a noble achievement!" he said, riding his first train. "We fly like the clouds in a storm." He met Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Kierkegaard, Ibsen. "He looks like a large child, a sort of half-angel," said the Irish poet William Allingham. He loved as a child loves: marriage and children were grown-up affairs and not for him. His fears were those of a child: of falling ill, taking the wrong medicine, putting letters...
...acts in human history, and that Christianity will have to survive, if at all, without him. Altizer notes that this new kind of Godless Christianity is a uniquely American phenomenon, although it acknowledges an intellectual debt to certain European thinkers, religious as well as secular. From Sören Kierkegaard, the death-of-God thinkers developed the idea that organized Christianity is a kind of idolatry that has obscured the real message of the Gospel behind irrelevant and outdated cultural forms. And they follow closely in the footsteps of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi German martyr of World...
...leap into Finnegans Wake or Wittgenstein is almost as unseemly and possibly as dangerous as it is for a middle-aged stockbroker to demonstrate push-ups at a party. By the same token, the would-be title-dropper should stay firmly away from The Golden Bough, the Aeneid, Kierkegaard, The Wealth of Nations, Rousseau, Thucydides, The Origin of Species, Teilhard de Chardin, and any other reading that assistant professors of English call "seminal...