The latest Kierkegaard Newsletter is out, and includes some timely meditations for Lent. Here is the opening paragraph from a review of a new book by Jason Mahn.
“O happy fault, which merited such and so great a Redeemer!” is the joyous fifth-century Easter-Eve exclamation which resounds throughout Jason Mahn’s perceptive and theologically sensitive exploration of the felix culpa in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. There are, as Mahn astutely elucidates in this admirable work (and as I also emphatically concur), few thinkers who possess Kierkegaard’s talent for transmuting the darkest night which is ostensibly furthest from redemption into an occasion for the dawning of faith. Kierkegaard’s works, as Mahn perceptively reads them, provide us with ‘an existential via negativa through which he labors to revive the possibility of faith.’ However, this ‘existential’ dimension does not, Mahn argues, lead so much to the Angst of modern existentialism as it does to the sacred praise of early Christianity. In this I am again in sympathy with the theological anthropology Mahn proposes: while Kierkegaard is clearly a progenitor of existentialist philosophy, his own source of ‘existential’ pathos can be discovered within the archives of devotional Christianity.
Read the whole thing here.
When the landlord of the building gave me the basement apartment, he said, “Be sure to check out the bar right above you—my brother-in-law is the owner and they serve a great steak. Tell him I sent you. And you should visit the barbershop on the other side of the building; my nephew owns it, and I’ll tell him you’ll be stopping by. But you don’t need to go up to any of the floors above, and in fact it’d be great if you would just stay out of the lobby altogether—it’s really for the people in the building.”



This is a re-enactment of a spontaneous and unrehearsed reaction to this 








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