Spiritual Writings: A New Translation and Selection

“Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe.” —John Updike, Harper Perennial Modern Classics presents the rediscovered spiritual writings of Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Oxford theologian George Pattison. Called “the first modernist” by and “the father of existentialism” by the , Kierkegaard left an indelible imprint on existential writers from Sartre and Camus to Kafka and Derrida. In works like , , and , he by famously articulated that all meaning is rooted in subjective experience—but the devotional essays that Patterson reveals in will forever change our understanding of the great philosopher, uncovering the spiritual foundations beneath his secularist philosophy.