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 as Resource for Feminist, Womanist, and Queer Constructive Theologies

As the lives and personhood of women, people of color, and those from the queer community of all backgrounds and identities continue to be increasingly devalued, marginalized, dehumanized, and brutalized in the current socio-cultural context of the U.S., it is incumbent upon us to plumb the depths of Kierkegaard’s writings in order to share the unexpected resources for constructing life-affirming and life-thriving feminist, womanist, and queer theologies. Although Kierkegaard was a product of his own nineteenth century cultural context of gender essentialism, he was ahead of his time in many ways and often challenges the assumptions of his culture through his celebration of women as exemplars/icons of the Christian life. He moves female identity from margin to center in his writings and highlights interdependence and certain types of community as key facets of his thought. 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. His assertions about the equality of all human beings in relation to God, the affirmation of becoming a particular self in finitude through one’s faith relationship to God through the paradox of Christ, his emphasis on the embodied life of faith lived in relation to God and neighbor, and the parameters he sets on the extent to which humans ought to suffer in emulation of Christ in acknowledgment of the singularity of Christ’s sacrifice all serve as potential resources, among many others, in constructing life-giving theologies that are expansive, generative, and point toward social justice and communal flourishing for women, people of color, and the queer community. Therefore, this session invites papers that read Kierkegaard through these critical and constructive lenses in order to further push his thought to its full liberative potential.

Kierkegaard and Biblical Hermeneutics

The second themed session (co-sponsored with the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture unit) invites papers that explore the engagement of Søren Kierkegaard with biblical hermeneutics in his For Self-Examination (1851). With the destructive forces of Christian nationalism on the rise and the future of democracy in the United States at stake, it is critical for us to consider how various biblical hermeneutical frameworks reveal the motivations of human hearts more-so than they reveal about the biblical text itself. In For Self-Examination, 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 consequential nature of our various hermeneutical approaches, this co-sponsored session seeks papers that engage Søren Kierkegaard’s approach to biblical hermeneutics (as found in For Self-Examination) in conversation with past, present, and emerging trends in biblical hermeneutics, particularly those that address the rise of Christian nationalism. 

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.