Kierkegaard: A Christian Thinker for Our Time?

On May 5, 1813, Søren Kierkegaard was born to Christian parents in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the Evangelical Lutheran Church was supported by the state with the Danish monarch as its supreme authority. Forty-two years later, Kierkegaard died while in the midst of directing an extended philosophical and theological attack on the Church of Denmark and its official representatives, whom he believed were undermining, rather than fostering, the practice of authentic Christianity.

With great passion and vision Kierkegaard engaged the challenges of his age: he articulated in his work and displayed in his brief life the journey of "becoming a Christian" within the crucible of early nineteenth-century Danish Christendom. He was perhaps the most important Christian thinker of his time. But is he a Christian thinker for our time—do his ideas resonate in our 21st-century context? To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard's birth, the 2013 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture will host a wide-ranging exploration of this question.