Kierkegaard's Pastoral Dialogues

Kierkegaards Pastoral Dialogues takes a selection of Kierkegaards most insightful spiritual writings and transforms them into a series of dialogues between two friends a believer and a nonbeliever. In this way some of Kierkegaards complex religious thought is made accessible to a wider readership so as to provide a resource for individual or group study in pastoral counseling or spiritual direction contexts. Each dialogue is accompanied by a commentary and questions to help discussion by groups or application by individuals. Finally there are three responses from respectively a philosopher a theologian and a hospital chaplain looking at how the dialogues may be relevant to these different fields of practice. Kierkegaard is a profound Socratic and dialogic thinker. Sometimes this dialogue is implicit in his work and other times explicit. Kierkegaards Pastoral Dialogues offers a way into this thinking that makes the dialogical element both explicit and attentive relating Kierkegaards dialogue with his reader to a contemporary pastoral context. A good book that presents not learning about but from Kierkegaard. --Eberhard Harbsmeier Professor Aarhus University In these imaginative dialogues Pattison and Jensen have captured the pith of Kierkegaards thinking on matters of life and death. They have done so without bowdlerizing or oversimplifying the texts. It is an achievement in the art of communication that Kierkegaard himself would have smiled upon! --Gordon Marino Director of Hong Kierkegaard Library St. Olaf College Can Kierkegaard comfort the anguished--acknowledging wounds and also ways to staunch them--through reflection and also through posture and bearing? This book is an utter success in bringing Kierkegaards Lilies of the Fields and Birds of the Air into immediate resonance with believer and nonbeliever alike addressing aching questions not as aberrant but as profoundly and touchingly human. It provides heartfelt pastoral dialogues on sorrow and delight that a reader will find transforming. --Edward F. Mooney Professor at Syracuse University This is a most welcome book full of fresh and vibrant vistas on faith prayer virtue and Christian character. Pattison and Jensens adaptation is richly complemented by essays from John Lippit Simon Podmore and John McLuckie who provide helpful and illuminating reflections on Kierkegaards extraordinary pastoral wisdom. This is an outstanding book that will both challenge and nourish all who study pastoral theology. --Martyn Percy Ripon College Cuddesdon George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and has written extensively on Kierkegaard and modern religious thought. His most recent books are Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century and Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life. Helle Moller Jensen has a doctorate in Systematic Theology from the University of Aarhus. After eleven years of experience as a hospital chaplain she is currently a parish priest in the Danish Peoples Church and is also a military chaplain to the Danish Royal Lifeguards.