Kierkegaard and Spirituality

Stephen Backhouse
— author of Kierkegaard: A Single Life and Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism
“There is a very short list of people who can communicate Kierkegaard clearly, and C. Stephen Evans is on that list. Evans has been reading and living Kierkegaard for over fifty years—his insights and arguments about Kierkegaard are always worth having. This book is no different. Kierkegaard is not usually thought of as a ‘spiritual writer” but, by drawing from the texts nearest and dearest to Kierkegaard’s heart, Evans creates a good case for seeing Kierkegaard as a humanist, Christian, and deeply spiritual guide to authentic living through accountability.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff
— Yale University
“Over and over Evans illuminates Kierkegaard’s always suggestive, but often dark and baffling, rhetoric. Over and over he shows that the conventional interpretation of Kierkegaard’s thought is mistaken. What emerges is a Kierkegaard I did not know—a Kierkegaard that most of us did not know. This is as good as commentaries get.”

Mark Tietjen
— author of Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians
“C. Stephen Evans reminds us that while Kierkegaard is a distinctly Christian thinker, anyone interested in spirituality broadly understood has something to gain from one of the great masters of the human spirit. This book successfully demonstrates that Kierkegaard’s psychology and theology cannot be separated and that if you are interested in one, you must confront the other. This is Evans’s eighth book on Kierkegaard for a reason: somehow, he manages to uphold the integrity of each unique work under consideration while also proving the overall coherence of Kierkegaard’s authorship that each human is called to become a self before God.”

Rick Anthony Furtak
— Colorado College
“Along with its many other virtues, this book sheds light upon the Danish thinker’s favorable treatment of faith defined more widely—sometimes as Socratic, but also as what may be called Abrahamic, insofar as it involves trust in a distinctly personal God. In Kierkegaard and Spirituality, Evans gives due attention to Christianity in a strict sense, admirably parting company with the great Dane when his religious vision becomes too strict in some very late writings.”