An evocative guide through Kierkegaard's major themes of fragility, faith, birth, and death.

Noted Kierkegaard scholar Edward Mooney guides the reader through the major themes of the Danish philosopher's life and thought. Each chapter frames a striking issue, usually encapsulated in a short passage from Kierkegaard, and pursues it directly and deeply.

Kierkegaard speaks to our need for self-understanding, our need to negotiate the tensions between surprisingly subtle capacities for communication and surprisingly easy descent into clichés and banality. The chapter of this book follow and re-animate Kierkegaard's brilliant and humorous discussions of death and authenticity, of the maternal and paternal in faith and self-transformations, of self-deception and obsessive judgmentalism, of love and the search for stable centers, of subjectivity as refinement of responsiveness to others, the world, and all we can value. These evocative explications aim to match his stride in tracking deep human concerns that evade academic and cultural pigeonholes. Like Hamlet, Kierkegaard gives us a "poem unlimited" that is open to endless reflection. Mooney's aim is to bring his matchless impulse and aspiration once more to life.

Mooney's voice is a unique one in Kierkegaard studies, attentive and intimate, restless and affirmative, perhaps even a peculiarly American voice, the Dane by way of Whitman and Melville and Emerson. [?] Mooney's soliloquies speak deeply about pain and loss and Kierkegaardian resources for coping with suffering without trivializing it, but there is not much vocabulary of sin or salvation [?] Mooney's Kierkegaard is human and comforting, and that is a vitally important aspect of the work to keep alive.