E-Books →Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector Faith, Finitude, and Silence

Sheridan Hough embarks on a groundbreaking "existential/ phenomenological" investigation of the uncanny abilities of the faithful life through an analysis of Kierkegaard's "spheres of existence"; each sphere reveals a specific kind of significance, and indeed a way of "being in the world." Hough employs a distinctively original narrative voice, one that examines Kierkegaard's ontology from the perspective of his pseudonymous voices, and from the characters that they create. This approach is both descriptive and diagnostic: by understanding what someone living out an aesthetic, ethical, or a religious existence seeks to achieve, the phenomenon of the faithful life, and its demands, comes into sharper focus. This faith is not simply some thought about God's greatness-indeed, the "propositional content" of faith is a central issue of the book. Instead, Hough argues that Kierkegaardian faith is the hallmark of the fullest flowering of a human life, one achieved in ways only hinted at in the demeanor of the cheerful and enigmatic "tax collector," an existential task in which "temporality, finitude is what it is all about."