The essays in this volume are inspired by the influential and multi-faceted work of Jon Stewart on the historical context and subsequent legacy of Soren Kierkegaard. Following the lead of Stewart, they provide a corrective to readings that treat Kierkegaard’s texts and the works of writers influenced by him in abstraction from the specific conversations, disputes, and trends in which they were situated. The array of essays presents an interdisciplinary and international engagement with the philosophy, religion, and culture of Golden Age Denmark and Northern Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some explore the specific issues, academic debates, and cultural crises with which Kierkegaard and his contemporaries wrestled, illumining how thinkers like Kierkegaard, Heiberg, and Martensen would have been understood in their own era. Some explore the overt or more surreptitious influence of Kierkegaard upon later thinkers. Other essays take a broader look at the history of modern philosophy, searching for continuities and discontinuities. Still others use reflections on Kierkegaard’s context as a springboard and a resource to launch their own creative philosophical and theological reflections. Taken together, these essays clarify how the immediate intellectual environment in which Kierkegaard’s thought evolved contained the seeds of the intellectual dynamics of emergent modernity and post-modernity. Kierkegaard’s enormously generative and destabilizing era has bequeathed to the contemporary world the constellation of issues associated with the tension of relativism and absolutism, nihilism and dogmatism, and subjectivism and objectivism, all of which still animate our cultural world. Contributors include: Lee C. Barrett, Maria J. Binetti, Istavan Czako, Roe Fremstedal, Dario Gonzalez, Finn Gredal jensen, Nathaniel Kramer, Peter Sajda, Gerhard Schriber, Heiko Schulz, K. Brian Soederquist, Curtis L. Thompson.
