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Kierkegaard, MacDonald, and Universalism at the 2025 AAR

As usual, this year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of religion was rich with Kierkegaard sessions. I will say more about those sessions in a later post. The point of this post is to describe what were, for me, the highlights of the conference. 

I don’t know whether I mentioned this in any earlier posts, but I’m a member of an Anglo-Catholic church here in Philadelphia called S. Clement’s. It is a wonderful community of generally politically progressive, but liturgically conservative, Christians and it has the most beautiful services I’ve ever attended. Michael Glass, a Kierkegaard scholar who recently received his Ph.D. from Temple is also a member of S. Clement’s.

So anyway, my husband, Brian Foley decided we should try to attend the High Mass at an Anglo Catholic church while we were in Boston for the AAR meeting. I can’t remember whether I directed him to The Church of the Advent (which I had somehow learned the Kierkegaard scholar Jeff Hanson had been affiliated with at one time), or whether he found it on his own. Jeff was there, of course, that Sunday and we were able to chat briefly with him after the service. The highlight of the service, though, was a bell chorus and the flamboyant “Queen Anne’s” incense move shown in the video that accompanies this post. 

Wild, eh? 

The church was wonderful. The incense, unfortunately, set off the smoke alarm so everyone, congregation, choir, etc., etc. had to file out into the cold and conclude the services in the street. Everyone was very good natured about it, though, and when we received the all-clear, we headed downstairs for a sumptuous coffee hour and a trip to the little bookstore in the basement.

We’ll definitely be visiting The Church of the Advent again!

The second highlight of the conference for me was a special session on adoption of the Scriptural Reasoning Unit of the AAR. I presented a paper at that session entitled “The Dark Side of Adoption” that defended George MacDonald’s argument that Paul’s υίοθεσία (cf., e.g., Romans 8:15) should not be translated as “adoption.” I was surprised at how positive was the reception of my defense of MacDonald on this point. People often become very wedded to the precise wording of the writings they hold sacred, so I expected some pushback, but there was virtually none. I was also very fortunate to have MacDonald scholar Laurie Wilson present in the audience and she graciously helped me out with a couple of questions that stumped me. (I’ll say more about Wilson, who had earlier presented a paper at the joint session of the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Unit and the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit, in a later post.) 

MacDonald was a genius at, among other things, interpreting the Greek of the New Testament. He argued in a sermon entitled “Creation in Christ,” from Unspoken Sermons Series Three (published in 1889), that Biblical translators had mistranslated the beginning of the Gospel of John. As I mentioned, people often become very wedded to the precise wording of the writings they hold sacred, so it took a full one hundred years for MacDonald’s insight to be incorporated into any English translation of the Bible. It was finally incorporated, though, into the New Revised Standard Version (published in 1989) (I’m indebted to Ben White for pointing this out to me), so perhaps one day MacDonald’s point about the proper translation of υίοθεσία will be incorporated into an English translation of Romans.

The real highlight of the conference for me, though, was a special session that Lee Barrett, Robin Parry, and I organized on universalism. Parry, the author of the best-selling The Evangelical Universalist (published under the pseudonym Gregory MacDonald), chaired the session, Barrett, of Moravian Seminary, and Tom Greggs, of The Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton, were the presenters, and I served as a respondent after Thomas Talbott was forced to withdraw as a speaker for family reasons. 

I had no idea what to expect in terms of attendance. The session was what is called an “Other Event” at the AAR, meaning that it was not sponsored by an existing AAR unit. It was listed in the conference program, and the Søren Kierkegaard Society had generously promoted it to its members, but I had no idea how many people would actually read the program that closely, or how many Kierkegaard people would be interested in universalism. We’d discussed ordering refreshments for the session, but had decided against it out of fear that there might not be enough people to justify spending the money.

How wrong we were! The venue, albeit small, was packed. There was literally standing room only. The papers were excellent and the discussion was exceptionally lively. There was a palpable energy among those present, even my husband, who showed up only as the session was concluding, remarked on it. Parry explained that the session organizers were in the process of establishing a new scholarly organization, the Society for the Study of Christian Universalism, and requested that anyone interested in joining the society should put their name and contact info on a sheet that would be passed around the audience. We got more than twenty names! (Several of the names and email addresses were undecipherable, though, and my guesses as to what they were were unsuccessful, so if you had put your name on the list, but have not yet heard from me, please email me at mgpiety@drexel.edu and tell me that you want to be added to the list. Or if you were not present at the AAR session but you are reading this post and would like to be added to the list, just let me know and I will add you.)

I was also able to become more closely acquainted with Kierkegaard scholar Casey Spinks who was in the audience and whom I spoke with briefly after the end of the session. I learned in that conversation that Spinks (whose Kierkegaard’s Ontology is forthcoming from Bloomsbury) had also been at The Church of the Advent that morning. There appears to be something in Anglo-Catholicism that is particularly appealing to Kierkegaard scholars. Perhaps it is the combination of deep spirituality of the Roman Catholic tradition and the anti-authoritarianism of the English Reformation. I’d be interested to hear from readers whether they are aware of any other Anglo-Catholic Kierkegaard scholars. 

I began this post with the objective of giving you a little smags prøve (or taste) of Barrett’s paper from the universalism session because that paper looked at universalism in the thought of Schleiermach, Hegel, and, of course, Kierkegaard. I particularly liked the section on Kierkegaard because Barrett makes a very convincing case that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist, without ever actually referring to the explicitly universalist passage from Kierkegaard’s journals. That is, Barrett argues that universalism can actually be inferred from various passages in Works of Love. I’ve decided, however, that that issue deserves a post of its own, so stay tuned. I should have it up in a few more days.

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

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The Decline of Editing

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion took place last week. As usual, there were three Kierkegaard sessions. I missed the first session, which was on Kierkegaard and “public philosophy.” The other two sessions were excellent. The theme of both sessions, which were sponsored by the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group of the AAR, was “Kierkegaard, Contagion, Class, and Corporeal Vulnerability,” so the sessions were timely, with frequent references to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I was particularly interested in “Kierkegaard, Emotional Contagion, and Affective Sociability,” a paper by Wojciech Kaftanski, who is affiliated with The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, a program with which Jeffrey Hanson, another Kierkegaard scholar is also affiliated. (Ironically, The Human Flourishing Program is housed at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Kierkegaard must be spinning in his grave!).

There was one passage of Kaftanski’s paper in which I was particularly interested. The passage is below, followed by the original Danish text.

“Nowadays…efforts are made in the states to bring about this irrationality, the existence of a prodigious monstrosity with many heads or, more correctly and accurately, a thousand-, according to the circumstances, a hundred-thousand-legged monstrosity, the crowd, an irrational enormity, or an enormous irrationality, that nevertheless has physical force, the force of the shout and uproar, also an amazing virtuosity in making everything commensurable with the hands raised to vote or with the decision of fists lifted up for a brawl. This abstraction is an inhuman something whose power is certainly enormous, but whose enormous power cannot be defined humanly but can be more accurately defined as the power of a machine”

“…sørges nutildags i Staterne for, at dette Ufornuftige finder Sted, at der existerer et eventyrligt Monstrum ||—|| med mange Hoveder, eller (rigtigere og) sandere, et Tusind-, efter Omstændighederne , et Hundredetusind-Been: Mængden, et ufornuftigt Uhyre eller et uhyre Ufornuftigt, som dog sandseligt har Magten, Skrigets og Larmens, item en beundringsværdigt Virtuositet it at gjøre Alt commensurabelt for de til Ballotation oprakte Hænders eller de til Slagsmaal opløftede Nævers Afgjørelse. Dette Abstractum er et umenneskeligt Noget, hvis Kraft dog ikke kan bestemmes menneskeligt, men rigtigere som man bestemmer en Maskines, at den har saa og saa mange Hestes Kraft; Mængdens Kraft er altid Hestekraft.” Pap. Vol. IX B24, p. 324.

It took me awhile to find the text because the first reference Kaftanski sent me was incomplete. He very kindly supplied me with the complete reference, however, after I pointed out the problem. I wanted to use the Danish text in something I was writing, so rather than type it all out from the hard my hard copy of the Papirer, I just typed “Hundredetusind-Been: Mængden” into the search field of the online edition of SKS. The online edition of SKS boasts that it is the complete text of everything, both published and unpublished, that Kierkegaard ever wrote, so I was confident that I would find the text there.

I didn’t.

See the screen shot that serves as an illustration for this post. Notice the text in the “Søgeresultater” (i.e., search results) field and the “Ingen resultater funded” (i.e., no results found). That’s right, the text of the passage that is there for all the world to see in the hard copy of the Papirer does not come up when one searches on any of the various phrases from the passage that I tried in my repeated vain attempts to save myself the trouble of retyping all the text.

I had actually considered getting rid of my hard copy of the Papirer since I has assumed everything that I would ever need would be at my electronic fingertips. Good thing I didn’t, eh?

So let that be a lesson to those of you who had assumed, as I had, that you didn’t any longer need to have hard copies of Kierkegaard’s works in Danish.

But back to Kaftanski’s paper. I enjoyed the paper, though I’m at a loss now to summarize it. Wojciech indicated to me, however, that it was roughly the same as a section of his recently published Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity, so I decided to just go ahead and buy the whole book. I can’t weigh in on the book yet. I will do that at a later date. The purpose of this post is to vent about, as the title suggests, the decline in editing at academic presses. There are two problems quite early in Wojciech’s book that an editor should have caught. They are minor, and likely won’t cause any problems in understanding the text, but they’re annoying and should not have made it past an editor. They’re actually on the same page, page 6, according to my ebook version. The first is an anachronistic reference to a “cocktail party.” The sentence is:

“This phenomenon Kierkegaard sees chiefly in the young and privileged who spend their time strolling through the city, visiting department stores, frequenting theaters and amusement parks, but also meeting at cafes or cocktail parties to exchange gossip about the next series of novelties coming to town and discussing whether or not to engage with them.”

The problem is that while the first reference to a “cocktail” appears to have occurred around the end of the eighteenth century, the expression “cocktail party” is much later. The phenomenon of the cocktail party dates from the early part of the 20th century. What Kaftanski meant, I’m sure, was that “the young and privileged” met in cafes and in literary and social “salons” in private homes.

The second problem is a reference to “salaried labor,” when what Kaftanski clearly means is not salaried labor but wage labor. The sentence is:

“In factories, wool mills, and servitude, engaged in salaried labor, people were reduced to performing tedious manual and alienating work, which consisted mainly of producing multitudes of copies.”

The sentence is a little bit labored, beginning as it does with a relative clause. The problem, though, is that 19th-century workers of the sort Kaftanski describes would not generally be spoken of as “salaried.” They would have been paid “wages.” Salaried labor usually involves a contract that specifies the terms of employment. Wage labor typically does not. Salaried labor is generally of a higher status than wage labor. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be in a scholarly work of this sort.

These two minor stylistic problems should not affect the reader’s understanding of the text, but they are still annoying. They aren’t Kaftanski’s fault because English is not his mother tongue. It IS the mother tongue, I presume, however, of the editors over at Routledge. Did the editors even look at the manuscript before they sent it to press? Poor editing is one of my pet peeves. I guess it bothers me so much in part because I’ve had a lot of demanding teachers who have drilled points like those above home to me, and in part because I’ve been a victim of poor editing myself.

There’s increasing talk of reducing the time to both an undergraduate and a graduate degree. The idea, of course, is to save money. I’m sympathetic with the motivation, but concerned that we are losing our grip on scholarly standards as it is. I hate to think of what books will look like that have been produced by editors who are products of accelerated degree programs!

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Report on 2016 Eastern APA Meeting

APA Plenary Address '16The 2016 annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association took place on January 6-9 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C. The Søren Kierkegaard Society sponsored a session around the middle of the first day. Unfortunately, there was a mistake in the scheduling of that session. It was given a two-hour slot when it should have been given a three-hour slot. There were four speakers scheduled to present in that session and there is no way four people can present papers in a two hour session, so the session was moved to a three-hour time slot later that afternoon.

Jeffrey Hanson, who bears a striking resemblance to Kierkegaard, chaired the session, so he dutifully stood outside the room where the session should originally have taken place and alerted people to its new time and place. It looked to be a great session. The speakers were: Antony Aumann of Northern Michigan University, Jerome Gellman of Ben-Gurion University, Birte Loschenkohl of the University of Chicago, and Anthony Rudd, of St. Olaf College. Aumann’s paper was entitled “On Kierkegaard, Art, and Autonomy.” Gellman’s paper was “Volition and the Leap of Faith.” Loschenkohl’s was “Exception, Suspension, and Resistance in Kierkegaard (and Schmitt).” And Rudd’s was “Was Kierkegaard a Divine Command Theorist? Should He Have Been?”

Sadly, I cannot report on that session because I was scheduled to chair a session on the philosophy of religion that afternoon during the same time as the rescheduled Kierkegaard session.

So why am I writing on this year’s APA session if I cannot report on the Kierkegaard papers? Good question. I’m writing because it was otherwise a fantastic meeting, the best I have ever attended, and much of what made it so great touches on things near and dear to Kierkegaard, and to many Kierkegaard scholars.

The first thing I liked about the meeting was that it was much smaller and hence more intimate and collegial than any of the earlier meetings I’ve attended. Just how small it was is apparent in the photo above of the plenary session in which the chair of the NEH spoke about two new NEH grant programs. (More about that below.)

Of course the reasons for low attendance at this year’s meeting are sad. Higher education is in trouble. Enrollments are down pretty much across the board, so there are not many new positions being advertised. Moreover, drops in enrollments mean there is less money to send hiring committees to the meeting to interview job candidates, as was standard practice in the past. Much interviewing is now done via Skype. The positive side of this was that the sometimes oppressive air of desperation generated by frantic job seekers (we’ve all been there) was conspicuously absent. My impression was that most attendees were established professionals and most of those people are understandably happier and less frantic than people on the job market.

The positive atmosphere of the meeting was enhanced even further by a pronounced focus on the responsibilities philosophers bear to the general public. This is the aspect of the meeting that I think will interest Kierkegaard scholars. Kierkegaard insisted that philosophy should be relevant to the life of the individual, that it should not be a purely abstract, or academic, activity.

The plenary address on Thursday was given by William “Bro” Adams, the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Adams spoke about two new grant programs the NEH has to encourage philosophers to reach out to the general public. The first is the Public Scholar Program. The is a grant program that gives support to individuals working on “well-researched books in the humanities intended to reach a broad readership.” The second program is “The Humanities in the Public Square.” This program “supports scholarly forums, public discussions, and educational resources related to the themes of a new NEH initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square.”

The plenary address was not the only part of the meeting that emphasized the duty of philosophers to engage with the general public. There was a session on the first day, sponsored by the Society for Applied Philosophy, on “Current Ethical and Justice Issues in Higher Education” that included a panel of seven scholars. There was a session the next day, sponsored by the APA Committee on Public Philosophy, entitled “Philosophy for the Public: Reports from the Field and National Endowment for Humanities Grants.” Lynne Tirrell of UMass Boston spoke on “Philosophy in Public: Modes of Engagements and Topics of Choice.” Peter Fristedt and Mark Silver, both from the NEH, spoke on the aforementioned NEH grant programs and offered advice on how to apply for them. Michael Lynch of U of Connecticut spoke on “Writing Philosophy for the Public,” and Gaurev Vazirani of Yale talked about Yale’s new philosophy blog WiPhi in a paper entitled “WiPhi: Developing Online Public Philosophy.”

Cool, eh? If you’ve been reading this blog since its launch in 2010, you have been in the forefront of the philosophical movement to bring philosophy to the general public. If you are a Kierkegaard scholar, you may be surprised to learn that many non-scholars also read this blog. I know because they occasionally email me about how much they love Kierkegaard even though they are not themselves scholars. I have actually endeavored to make this blog interesting to a wider public with the “Once Upon a Time in Copenhagen” and other similar posts. If you haven’t read any of those posts, I encourage you to go back and check them out. Some of them are pretty fun.

Also, if you haven’t yet checked out my other blog The Life of the Mind, definitely do that. I write there on a variety of issues of general interest, such as the First Amendment, race, and even the practical value of philosophical study, and I often manage to work in a reference to Kierkegaard. That blog now has more than 4,000 subscribers. How is that for engaging with the public!

I’m not done yet, however, in describing the emphasis at this most recent APA meeting on what philosophy can contribute to general public. There were two sessions sponsored by the National Philosophical Counseling Association (not to be confused with the American Philosophical Practitioners’ Association, another organization dedicated to philosophical counseling). Philosophical counseling is, I think, one of the most important ways that philosophers can show the relevance of philosophy to the lives of people who are not themselves professional philosophers. Different philosophical counselors practice their craft in different ways, of course. The most productive approach, I believe, however, is to view philosophical counseling as a kind of individual philosophical tutoring with an emphasis on how the mere activity of reflecting on one’s life can actually improve the quality of it.

The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA) held a session entitled “The Obligations of Philosophers.” I particularly enjoyed Jackie Kegley’s paper. The title was, unfortunately, not listed in the conference program and I don’t now recall the title she gave it. It was very similar, however, to the title of her contribution to the volume Practicing Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism (Brill/Rodopi, 2015). I’d seen that volume in the Book Exhibit, but hadn’t bought it. I was so favorably impressed by Kegley’s talk, however, that I ran right back to the Book Exhibit after the session and bought what I believe was their only copy.

There were lots of other sessions, such as the one entitled “Philosophy and Happiness” (sponsored by the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society) whose titles clearly indicated the topics discussed would be of interest to a broader audience than just scholars. I’d never seen anything like it in all my years of attending the APA. I don’t mean to suggest that professional philosophy has been transformed overnight from a vicious adversarial discipline to a unified udaimonistic movement. Daily Nous reported that “play nice” was overheard by at least a few conference attendees, so there is still work to be done.

All-in-all, however, this year’s meeting was an uplifting experience and highlighted that the discipline is indeed moving in new and more positive directions that will benefit not only professionals, but humanity as a whole. That is certainly something Kierkegaard would applaud!