Comments | godwillnspire: Books I Read in 2010

godwillnspire

Books I Read in 2010

Jan 09, 2011 13:35

In 2008 I read 13 books (about 5,121 pages); in 2009 I read 15 books (about 5,683 pages)... last year I continued this upward trend and got through 21 books (about 6,615 pages). Although reading is something I often have to be quite intentional about doing (when it's not fiction), I'm finding the task to be more and more satisfying. Here's the ( Read more... )

end-of-year, book review

Comments 6

scionofgrace January 9 2011, 22:12:06 UTC

Hello again!

The politics one sounds interesting. Context is so important to understanding any literature, and I think it's too easy to forget the kind of setting Jesus was dealing with, and what the Jews thought the Messiah was supposed to be. (I understand that many Jews still object to Jesus because he didn't deliver Israel the way they thought he would.)

Kierkegaard is someone I was introduced to in high school and never went back to. Perhaps I should take another look, if only for the impact he's had on modern thought.

essius January 11 2011, 20:01:10 UTC

Your friend is right. Not one word of Fear and Trembling-or any of the other pseudonymous works-is his own, as Kierkegaard indicates in the addendum to Concluding Unscientific Postscript (on which see here). But even apart from a consideration of Kierkegaard's pseudonymity, it doesn't seem like Fear and Trembling exhibits Abraham as morally infallible. Rather, it says that morally speaking Abraham is a murderer, and religiously speaking he is following the commandments of God. To be sure, morality here is conceived in terms of Hegel's "social morality" (Sittlickheit), so in some ways we can think of Kierkegaard as arguing against cultural relativism or "conventionalism," but never does Johannes de Silentio say that Abraham is morally infallible (even from a religious standpoint) in all that he does. Nevertheless, Abraham remains the OT exemplar of faith par excellence (as we see in Gen. 48:15, Rom. 4:9,12,16, Gal. 3:7-9, and Heb. 11:8,17).

godwillnspire January 11 2011, 23:40:32 UTC

As I recall, the author made it a critical point, several times, that we must assume Abraham loved his son perfectly, and fulfilled his marital duties perfectly... as if we could trust all of Abraham's actions and motivations as the incarnate, revealed, and prescribed will of God.

essius January 13 2011, 00:13:56 UTC

That could all very well be an exaggeration to stress the discontinuity between the ethical and the religious spheres. Even the most exemplary agent of the ethical sphere is not eo ipso in the religious sphere.

godwillnspire January 13 2011, 01:55:46 UTC

Abraham is not the most exemplary agent of the ethical sphere, but the author seems to assume that he is, just as much as he assumes that he is the most exemplary agent in the religious sphere... This is how the author seems to set things up, before exploring the attempted-sacrifice-of-Isaac event (though it's not as if the author wrote in such strict chronological order, but that he is always falling back on hopeful presuppositions of Abe's infallibility, so to justify looking for inconsistency elsewhere ( ... )

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