Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel: Essays on the Lily Discourses

This is the first book in any language to collect scholarly essays on Kierkegaard’s extraordinary series of Lily Discourses. Long considered “merely” devotional writings, the Lily Discourses constitute a sustained and repeated attempt to respond to the imperative issues in Matthew’s Gospel. Kierkegaard discovers in figures of the lily and the bird a paradoxical obligation to think together, unremittingly, both suffering and joy, the fleeting nature of experience, and the effort to endow this very transience with enduring significance. In Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel, a diverse group of emerging and established interpreters addresses the religious, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these discourses. In the process, they identify and develop a theory of language—and of exemplarity—crucial to all of Kierkegaard’s writings. To ask what the lily and bird teach is also to ask what it means, or could mean, to be human. This collection is pivotal in registering, clarifying, and celebrating Kierkegaard’s multiple responses to that question suspended at the heart of his Lily Discourses. It is the go-to text for anyone teaching or writing about the Lily Discourses across philosophy, literary studies, and religion.