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

by Frances Maughan-Brown (Editor), Rick Anthony Furtak (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350476554
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/18/2025
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	591 KB

About the Author

Frances Maughan-Brown is Lecturer in Philosophy and the First Year Program at the College of the Holy Cross, USA.

Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, USA.
Frances Maughan-Brown is Lecturer in Philosophy and the First Year Program at the College of the Holy Cross, USA. She is the author of The Lily's Tongue: Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard's Lily Discourses (2019).
Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, USA. He has published more than fifteen essays on Kierkegaard's thought, as well as two books: Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity and the Cambridge Critical Guide to Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Table of Contents

Preface, Frances Maughan-Brown (College of the Holy Cross, USA) and Rick Anthony Furtak (Colorado College, USA)

Part I: The Lily and the Bird
1. The Remains: Let it be Lily, Frances Maughan-Brown (College of the Holy Cross, USA)
2. Considering the Birds of the Air: Winged Creatures of Uncertainty and Belief, Rick Anthony Furtak (Colorado College, USA)
Part II: On Reading
3. On Beginning and Listening in Kierkegaard's The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Iben Damgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
4. The Temptation of Ambiguity, Elizabeth X. Li (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
5. Prudence and Openness in Kierkegaard's Lilies and Birds, Erin Plunkett (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
6. The Music of the Poet and the Sounds of the Lily and the Bird, Elisabete M. de Sousa (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Part III: Either/Or Again
7. Repeating Either/Or?, George Pattison (University of Glasgow, UK)
8. From “the Starry Heavens Above” to “the Lily of the Field”, Marcia Robinson (Syracuse University, USA)
9. Taming the Troll: Kierkegaard on Self-Torment, Aestheticism, and Faith, Genia Schönbaumsfeld (University of Southampton, UK)
10. Kierkegaard on Natural and Artistic Beauty, Antony Aumann (University of Northern Michigan, USA)
Part IV: Between Two Virtues
11. Contentment and Discontentment with Being Human, Adam Buben (Leiden University, the Netherlands)
12. Creaturely Agency: Clarifying Kierkegaard's Notion of Contentment, Dante J. Clementi (University of Saint Andrews, UK)
13. The Unconditioned Obedience of the Lily and Bird, Sergia Hay (Pacific Lutheran University, USA)
14. Kierkegaard's Charitable Misanthropy, Ulrika Carlsson (Independent Scholar, USA)
Part V: The Imperative
15. The Inversion of Human Exceptionalism: Kierkegaard's Imago Dei Read Ecologically, Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal (University of Cambridge, UK)
16. On Becoming a Humus Being, Jason A. Mahn (Augustana College, USA)
17. Taking Care: Of Kierkegaard's Incomparable Lily Discourses, Kevin Newmark (Boston College, USA)
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a deeply peaceful book, inviting us to contemplate the lilies and the birds with Kierkegaard. The reader experiences the constancy and quiet joy of these beings through essays that range across Kierkegaard's writings.” —Eleanor Helms, Professor of Philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, USA

“Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel: Essays on the Lily Discourses offers a timely, cross-disciplinary study of our ambiguous relations with ourselves, each other, and our planet. The editors have gathered diverse voices and approaches from around the globe in an unprecedented compilation of nuanced study and insight. The Kierkegaardian oeuvre, the Lily Discourses, and biblical hermeneutics (concerning a famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount) all receive new life in this magnificent volume – both for the seasoned Kierkegaard scholar and those new to his work.” —Anna L Söderquist, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Curator of the Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, Minnesota, USA

“Frances Maughan-Brown and Rick Anthony Furtak have convened a diverse group of international contributors who together explore the many discourses Kierkegaard composed at the provocation of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount's exhortation to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as models for human living. Maughan-Brown's influence in particular is everywhere in evidence in these chapters; the contributors are all building upon her pioneering study of writings from different works and years in Kierkegaard's career. The lily discourses are treated here with the care and thoughtfulness that they merit: The contributors develop the lyrical, musical, ecological, symbolic, aesthetic, ethical and even mystical aspects of these complex and challenging texts. Kierkegaard's meditations on the lily and the bird could not be more relevant or timely. In an age of anxiety and crisis, this volume proves that Kierkegaard's stern and soothing, difficult and beautiful words on living like the lily and the bird-free of care and fully present in the moment-speak more urgently to us today than ever.” —Jeffrey A. Hanson, Harvard University, USA

From the Publisher