New, Improved Piety on Kierkegaard!

I noticed recently that the “archives” links to earlier posts had disappeared. I contacted WordPress about this and they said it was probably because the blog theme I had originally chosen had been retired. They suggested I select a new theme, so I did. I like this theme because it is streamlined and makes the posts easier to read. It’s a “premium” theme and that means you should no longer see adds on the posts. There are several other changes that I think will improve the site as well. First, I’ve extended the time period for commenting on posts. It used to be something like a week. I think that isn’t enough time to comment on posts of the sort this blog contains, so I’ve extended the period now to 100 days. I’ve also added a page for “resources” with links to online resources such as the wonderful Ferrall-Repp Danish-English dictionary from 1845 to which I frequently refer. I will eventually also add links to important scholarly works that are in the public domain. I welcome suggestions for additions to this page.

I plan also to add a page of “testimonials.” I’ve had many people, both established scholars and graduate students, write to me and tell me that this blog has been an important resource for them. I’m going to collect some of those comments and post them, with the authors’ permission of course, to the “testimonials” page. There are a couple of reasons I want to do this. First, it will be helpful to people who are new to Kierkegaard and hence not in a good position to judge the quality of the posts. Second, it will help to establish to scholars, and university administrators who are not scholars, that this kind of digital scholarship is actually important to the profession. Many older scholars, as well as older administrators, have been slow to appreciate how important online resources can be. I think a page of testimonials will help to show the importance of such resources.

I may be mistaken, of course, but my guess is that blogs such as this will one day supplant in importance traditional scholarly journals. I don’t mean to suggest that journals will cease to exist. I think we’ll always have scholarly journals. My guess, though, is that they will nearly all eventually be exclusively online and that even then much of the cutting edge scholarship will take place outside of them because of how slow they are in getting material to the reading public. The problem isn’t getting the material into print, I believe, so much as it is getting referee reports in a timely fashion. I fear that isn’t much that can be done about that. Refereeing articles for scholarly journals is an important task but it is very time consuming. Sometimes the referees want changes to articles and that further delays the process of getting material into print.

Much of what I post isn’t time sensitive, but some of it is, such as my response to Peter Gordon’s review of Daphne Hampson’s book Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique in the New York Review of Books. I was able to get that post up when that issue of the NYRB was still in circulation. That prompted a conversation, of sorts, between Hampson and myself that likely would never have taken place had I tried to publish my response to the NYRB‘s piece in a scholarly journal and that conversation contains much valuable information concerning Kierkegaard’s view on science, nature, and miracles. If you found that information helpful, or found the information on other posts helpful, please comment to that effect on this post. I’ll eventually collect such comments and create at “testimonials” page for them.

In other news, I have heard from Baylor that they are planning to publish a paperback version of my book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology. That is good news. The original hard cover was reasonably priced, but the paperback should be even more affordable.

I’ll be back soon with a post on the conference I attended this summer in Munich!