Book Review: Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity:

Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity. By George B. Connell. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2016. xiii + 188 pp. $30.00 (paper).Spren Kierkegaard, hailing from a virtually homogenous nineteenth-century Lutheran Denmark, may not be the first resource that theologians and scholars of religion turn to for insight on navigating twenty-first-century questions about religious diversity. George Connells fine study, however, should make us reconsider. The third publication in the "Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker" series edited by fellow Kierkegaard scholars C. Stephen Evans and Paul Martens, Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity will compel anyone interested in pluralism, religious violence, and the meaning of truth claims to (re)meet Kierkegaard on new terms.In the last two decades, a host of Kierkegaard scholars have successfully challenged the traditional caricature of Kierkegaard as an apolitical and asocial individualist. Connell's study continues this reconsideration of Kierkegaard's pertinence for politics and society. What is new in this work, however, is a comprehensive consideration of Kierkegaard's relevance for contemporary religious diversity. In his conclusion, Connell tells his readers that he is writing in August of 2014, just as ISIS has seized large areas of Iraq and has persecuted religious minorities in the process. "It is impossible not to ask whether the logic of absolute commitment leads to such atrocities," he contends (p. 181). What are we to do, then, with Kierkegaard's insistence on the absolute commitment of faith?This question is related to the underlying theme of the book. Connell argues throughout that Kierkegaard's paradoxical ability to hold the universal and the particular together in tension offers resources for constructively responding to diversity. Absolute faith commitments, according to this paradoxical framework, do not have to precipitate religious terrorism, and can instead serve to encourage global peace and justice. "Kierkegaard s significance for the issue of religious diversity," Connell maintains, "is his ability (ironically) to say both/and to the either/or of commitment versus respectful openness" (p. 180).Each of the five chapters of Connell's work addresses an aspect of what he calls this "root paradox." In chapter 1, he notes that while Kierkegaard did not discuss a multitude of religious Others in his corpus, he did repeatedly take up the role of "pagans" and Jews. Particularly valuable here is Connell's insight that we must consider Kierkegaard's treatment of religious Others in light of his tripartite scheme: Pagan-Jew-Christian. The relationship between truth claims and religious pluralism is the subject of chapter 2, in which Connell insightfully examines Kierkegaard's "phenomenology of moods" as it maps to the categories of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, and then argues that Kierkegaard's use of humor is helpful for thinking about the ambiguous relationship between truth claims and diversity.Chapter 3 is a previously published article on examining Fear and Trembling through Danish film. …