Discussion on the rationale and potential for religion and being religious today. Naming Luther as a viable conversation partner with his theology of grace and hope, and particularly his freedom perspectives.

Luther offered a paradigm shift for theological method with his particular cross-orientation. With their own experience of suffering and despair serve, theologians of the cross can discern the true meaning of the gospel of Christ, name the reality as it is, and mystically know God radically present and compassionately loving.

Interpretation of Luther’s spiritual despair that led him to discover the liberating gospel of grace from the Scriptures and to reset his religious compass to reorient the teachings and practice of Christian faith with the assurance of the security of salvation. The chapter proposes freedom as the way to interpret Luther’s reform impulses as well as his own spiritual journey, theological insights, and negotiating his authority as a reformer.

An important contributory factor to the climate of hopelessness in our times is the loss of a transcendent-eschatological perspective. This chapter discusses the theological virtue of hope, which is radically different from this-worldly (‘natural’) hope. Some of the vices opposed to hope are examined, such as despair and presumption. A discussion of the gift of fear, the gift of the Holy Spirit associated with hope, concludes this chapter.

Chapter 2 examines the adaptation of the unemployment novel in midcentury African American fiction and in the racialized labor market of the United States. It argues that the resentment in the traditional unemployment novel was given a tone of despair in mid century African American literature – similar in affective structure to the longer tradition of the blues.

With his “born again” experience with Paul’s letter to the Romans about justification by faith alone, and criticizing the Christian church for ignoring people’s suffering, Luther called for reforms in teaching and practice, reimagining the parameters and depth of mystical God–human relationship, with an increased confidence of God’s mystical presence in human life and its transforming impact. Freedom from despair and freedom to compassionate living, with an assurance of salvation by faith became the pillars of Luther’s explicitly Christ-centric religion.

In this chapter, the phenomenology of emotions in people with schizophrenia is explored. A nuanced understanding of the specific emotional challenges in schizophrenia, together with their transformative potential, can inform psychotherapeutic and rehabilitative approaches and help to uncover their healing dimensions. The first section of the chapter examines the emotional world of the person with schizophrenia, focusing on profound emotional vulnerabilities and the alienating role that emotions can assume in this condition. The second section turns to the edge of human experience that gives rise to breakthrough and transformative experiences, all of which are intimately tied to emotion. People with schizophrenia often have a low threshold for a range of such breakthrough experiences, from falling into a ‘black hole’ of utter despair and anxiety‑laden psychotic states to moments of clarity and insight that resemble mystical experiences. The third section explores the therapeutic and healing potentials inherent in these emotional states.

Early in the text of Works of Love (1847) Kierkegaard makes the claim that “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.” The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate how this claim might relate to his later claim in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that it is faith that is the opposite of despair. The first section introduces the intertwined dynamics of love and despair as they are traced out by Kierkegaard in both Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The second section of this chapter argues that there is a genuine therapy that the loving person undergoes and is able through love of others to heal the sickness unto death that is nothing other than despair. The third and final section of this chapter considers the basis on which we might attribute to Kierkegaard a view of the theological virtues at least as being closely related by dint of a common structure and a common aspiration to consolation and integration of the self with itself in peace and reconciliation despite the unavoidable sorrows of our lives.

Self-love is a central yet somewhat neglected theme in Works of Love. While the mission of this text is to distinguish the spiritual from the worldly conception of love, when it comes to self-love commentators tend to presuppose our merely worldly understanding. But there is an essential split between the spiritual and worldly conceptions of self-love, hence this cannot be what Kierkegaard has in mind. To illustrate this, I identify two places where the worldly conception and Kierkegaard’s claims clash. My aim is to explain the spirit’s conception of self-love, thereby to explain Kierkegaard’s claims. I propose to reduce self-love to "willing to be oneself," a self-relation figuring in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. A person loves herself in that she wills to be herself. Yet she may do this properly or improperly: properly when she takes God as the criterion for the self she wills to be, improperly when she takes a merely human criterion. This account clarifies Kierkegaard’s claims about self-love in Works of Love.

In Kierkegaard, a three-part dialectical structure is set, first, by the two elements that comprise parts I and II of Either/Or, the “esthetic” and then the “ethical life.” A subsequent, third stage comes with a “teleological suspension of the ethical” (by which Kierkegaard means “suspension of the moral” in the modern sense) and a committing “leap” of faith. Unlike Marx’s version, Kierkegaard’s dialectic takes place not at the social level, but within an individual’s life in a way that can bring about an essentially individual authenticity and what Kierkegaard called “existential inwardness.” But if Kierkegaard’s dialectic, unlike Hegel’s and Marx’s, is decidedly not world historical, thus different from Hegel’s and Marx’s, the notions of individuality and authenticity that Kierkegaard develops are nonetheless themselves distinctively modern ethical ideas, more modern, indeed, than any idea of individuality that is in place in early modern moral philosophy. Kierkegaard’s concept of the “single individual” is more closely related to Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual,” to “individuality” in John Stuart Mill, and to the radically free subject of the twentieth-century existentialists, than it is to the “forensic” notion of the individual person or moral agent as, for example, in Locke or Kant.

In this chapter, a different expression of the notion of the double is introduced and discussed. Here, there is no apparent distinct double but rather there is an implicit assumption that doubles can and do exist. This implicit notion forms the basis for the abnormal belief in Capgras syndrome. Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian’, Patrick McGrath’s Spider, and Nabokov’s Despair are the prime examples of this approach to the notion of the double.

This chapter identifies a strain of political, affective maladjustment it labels “Hopeless Romanticism,” of which Percy Bysshe Shelley is an exemplary case. It argues that hope plays a fundamental role in the progressivist refusal to abide by the terms of the status quo. Hopeless romantics hold on to visions of a better world in spite of the crushing realities that surround them. This chapter tracks how this affective mechanism manifests in a series of Shelleyan poems where hope leaps past probabilistic boundaries, even as the despair that is hope’s other side repeatedly intrudes. Hope’s structural investment in futurity has made it both a symptom of weakened individual agency and a social portent of political change.

In this chapter, we argue that a distinct concept of “aesthetic hope” emerges from the way Kierkegaard’s Aesthete treats hope [Haab] and its relationship to recollection [Erindring] in “The Unhappiest One” and “Rotation of Crops.” We first show that aesthetic hope is distinct from the two other kinds of hope discussed by Kierkegaard: temporal hope and eternal hope. We then consider the suggestion that aesthetic hope is also an expression of despair – an inverse hope against hope, which seeks to avoid disappointment by hoping for things that are in some sense certain. The aesthete’s recommendation that we hope in such a way illuminates Kierkegaard’s view of the “dialectic” of temporal hope and eternal hope. Finally, we explore the treatment of hope in Either/Or as essentially involving a controlled, attentional element that anticipates some contemporary trends in the philosophy of hope.

Kierkegaard’s thesis that lacking faith is necessarily a state of despair leads to the conclusion that Either/Or’s fictional character Judge William, who belongs to the “ethical” rather than the “religious” stage of life, is, despite the many virtues of his position, in a state of despair. What does his despair amount to, then? Relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, I claim that the failure in the Judge’s view of life is rooted in his misguided understanding of what it is to be a “self.” By taking himself to have ultimate control over the way he is (in a manner akin to what Sartre’s means by “radical freedom”), the Judge fails to acknowledge that he possesses what I term an individual essence, bestowed upon him by God in a state of potential. This chapter explains the conception of individual essence and demonstrates how it applies to the Judge’s despair.

This essay discusses immediate, or “erotic,” aesthetic agency, the first of several stages of the figure of the aesthete in Either/Or. Erotic aesthetic agency consists in an almost naïve, all but nonpurposive pursuit of occasions to exercise the power to overwhelm the wills of others in one’s sheer desire of them, to incorporate them in one’s own terms by operation of simple impulse. The effect of this agency on others is to subject them to desire as such, that is, to desire as a force that binds them to the Don. But the ultimate aim of the agency is its existence: that it be. The conceptual structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of this starting point in the aesthetic view of the world, as it is presented by a self-professed fictional aesthete, is explored with reference to the figure that organizes much of the portrayal of the erotic aesthete, Don Juan, as he appears in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. Special attention is paid both to details of the opera as Kierkegaard would have experienced it and to the slippage between a reflective aesthete, A, imagining an unreflective aesthete, the Don, as an ideal.