Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Unit

Kierkegaard and Feminist, Womanist, and Queer Christologies • Kierkegaard and Biblical Hermeneutics 

Following the 2026 AAR presidential theme focused on “Future/s,” The Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Unit invites individual paper, panel session, and roundtable discussion proposals that highlight and engage with the religious, philosophical, and aesthetic thought and lifeworld of the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard. Knowledge about Kierkegaard has been enriched by the work of religious scholars, philosophers, historians, translators, artists, church practitioners, and others who have  combined to develop a field that attracts rigorous, diverse and interdisciplinary approaches to Kierkegaard’s ideas in the context of the time in which he lived and in relation to the complex world we inhabit now. 

In 2026, we call for papers that build upon and expand the extensive religious and philosophical scholarship on Kierkegaard available globally across disciplines and formations. We are particularly interested in papers for sessions that address Kierkegaard and Feminist, Womanist, and Queer Christologies, and Kierkegaard and Biblical Hermeneutics. In addition to these themed panels, we also seek papers on a diversity of topics related to Kierkegaard including Kierkegaard and Trauma and Kierkegaard and Democracy.

Kierkegaard and Feminist, Womanist, and Queer Christologies

For Søren Kierkegaard, there is no way to understand Christ properly without understanding him as the paradox. In the Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard goes so far as to name the Docetic denial of Christ’s humanity and embodiment, as well as the rationalist reduction of him to being merely human with no divinity, as ultimate forms of sin and despair, not least because for him, “in this denial of Christ as the paradox lies, in turn, denial of all that is essentially Christian.” In this way, Kierkegaard refuses to oversimplify the identity of Christ but insists relentlessly on holding aspects of his identity that could be construed as contradictory or mutually exclusive together in constant tension. Furthermore, Christ’s capacity to act as a salvific agent on behalf of humanity depends on this irresolvable tension within Christ’s personal identity. For Kierkegaard, it is absolutely crucial that Christ becomes “an individual human being” with all that embodiment and life within the finite entails. Kierkegaard’s Christianity, and more specifically his Christology, invite us to see that faith is lived out not by transcending or escaping the body or the finite realm with the various complexities and tensions they entail but by coming more deeply into the body and the finite. With his emphasis on individuality, embodiment, and paradox, Kierkegaard’s view of Christ offers rich possibilities for thinking through Christology from feminist, womanist, and queer perspectives.

The Kierkegaardian corpus includes many metaphorical references to both God and Christ as maternal figures. Lending special attention to a number of women from the Bible, Kierkegaard reads them and their relationships to Christ in liberating ways that challenge the Christian tradition’s sexism, misogyny, and denial of women’s agency. He goes so far as to claim that the woman with the alabaster jar described in the gospel of Luke as making herself “indispensable” to Christ, one of many empowering and iconoclastic claims about women in Kierkegaard’s writings. In these and other ways, Kierkegaard moves female identity from margin to center in his writings and highlights interdependence and community as key facets of his Christology. Moreover, his writings are rife with potential for lifting up Christianity’s resources for going beyond survival toward thriving and flourishing for various marginalized identities. He further sets parameters on the extent to which humans ought to suffer in emulation of Christ, maintaining the singularity of the efficacy of sacrifice and suffering of Christ’s cross. These aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought, as well as others, make him a fruitful interlocutor with feminist, womanist, and queer theorists seeking to understand Christ and the Christian community in ways that are expansive, generative, and that point toward social justice and communal flourishing. Reading Kierkegaard through these critical and constructive lenses can further push his thought forward to its full liberative potential.

Kierkegaard and Biblical Hermeneutics

The second themed session (co-sponsored with the Sacred Texts, Theory, and Theological Constructions Unit) invites papers that consider how various frameworks of biblical hermeneutics reveal the motivations of human hearts more-so than they reveal about the biblical text itself. In For Self-Examination (1851), Søren Kierkegaard invites his readers to engage with the biblical text with all the interest and passion that a lover would engage with a letter from one's beloved rather than as an object of impersonal disinterested speculation. The biblical text is then construed as a mirror that one must not look at as though observing the mirror itself but must see oneself in the mirror. How we relate to the biblical text is constitutive of our desires and therefore of our lived theologies. Considering the existentially and/or politically consequential nature of our various hermeneutical approaches, this co-sponsored session seeks papers that put Søren Kierkegaard’s approach to biblical hermeneutics as found in For Self-Examination (1851) into conversation with past, present, and emerging trends in biblical hermeneutics.

Kierkegaard and Trauma 

Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, has said that if “trauma originates in a fundamental injustice, then full healing must require repair through some measure of justice from the larger community.” In light of the existential, material, and embodied traumas impacting the human condition, Kierkegaard’s published and unpublished writings, authorship, performativity, pseudonyms, existentialisms, and religiosity offer paradigms, concepts, and ideas of potentiality and meaning for addressing the histories and legacies and continued and increasing occurrence of trauma in a 21st century world marked by global crises, pandemics, social upheaval, democratic uncertainty, stratification, and persistent violence against marginalized individuals and groups. Meditations on biopolitical traumas of the self, others, and society emerge in Kierkegaard’s entire corpus—Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death, for example—opening the way for religious and philosophical dialogues with psychology, trauma studies, literature, and moral injury; developing strategies for care, pastoral care, and chaplaincy; exploring the epistemic and emotional position of the fragmentary self in relation to the reconciled self, and examining positionality and the reading process from the perspective of the traumatized individual.