 |
| A crowd in Ferguson, Missouri |
by Andy Nowicki
At the age of 41, in the middle of what would prove to be his last year on earth, Danish writer and theologian Soren Kierkegaard shook off all subterfuge, dispensed with his coterie of coy pseudonyms, rejected his heretofore treasured "indirect approach" to polemics, and became for a time a hyper-conspicuous figure in Danish society, passing out homemade literature on street corners and railing against church authorities in a succession of scathingly-worded newspaper columns.
Kierkegaard's antics made a generally negative impression upon the Copenhagen cognoscenti, who mostly regarded him as a nuttering nuisance, or at best an eccentric monomaniac publicly flogging an increasingly woebegone spiritual hobbyhorse in a most unseemly manner. Yet the Kierkegaardian critique of the state-funded Danish Lutheran church, if severe, was in fact quite astute, and his approach, while brazen, avoided overt self-indulgence.
