Word: michalson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Some of these thorny trails of thought are explored in Christianity and the Existentialists, a new book published by Scribner ($3.75) and edited by Carl Michalson, professor of systematic theology at Drew University. Its eight chapters include studies of Kierkegaard by Theologian H. (for Helmut) Richard Niebuhr,* Spain's Miguel de Unamuno by President John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary, Nicholas Berdyaev by Matthew Spinka, professor of church history at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, Gabriel Marcel by Professor J. V. Langmead Casserley of the General Theological Seminary, Martin Heidegger by Erich Dinkler of Yale Divinity School...
Poison in the Beer. Liveliest chapter is Editor Michalson's own attempt to answer the question: What is existentialism? The layman's suspicion that it is some kind of clandestine wedding between Nordic melancholy and Parisian pornography, he admits, comes close to truth. "For . . . there is in existentialism a shocking sensualism, an erotic realism, a tearful and throbbing meeting of skin against skin, which, so characteristically French, appreciates propinquity of heart and fingertip." At the same time existentialism contains "a sentiment of constantly living over cracking earth, or at the foot of live volcanos, or in a land...
...encounter with the void around him and his necessary decision to walk forward in the darkness. For existentialism, in spite of all its talk, is a philosophy of action; words by themselves do not count. "One who murmurs in his beer, 'I wish I were dead,' " writes Michalson, "would only be really existing if he were at that moment quaffing poison." Kierkegaard, says Yale's Niebuhr, was much like his hero Socrates, "whose wisdom consisted in the knowledge of his ignorance, whose imperative was 'know thyself,' whose philosophy of life was 'reduplicated...
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