The Religion of Existence

Winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2017 Book Award for Constructive-Reflective Studies With a distinctive voice, remarkable clarity of prose, and keen insight, Noreen Khawaja’s The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre argues for a Christian infrastructure undergirding existentialism. “If God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence,” Sartre famously declared in “Existentialism is a Humanism,” announcing an atheist philosophy of radical freedom. But what if the Christian tradition is defined not by its dogma but by the task it demands of the subject? Then such a claim does not necessarily divorce one from the tradition. Khawaja identifies personal conversion and repentance as the beating heart of the Protestant tradition and so reveals existentialism as one more chapter in Christianity’s history. In so doing, she gingerly pulls the sheet over the face of the overtired account of existentialism that reads it solely as a reaction to the death of God. She thus suggests that freedom from the past is not what Sartre’s movement delivers, but also not what it promised either. In place of this well-worn story she draws a line of continuity running from the seventeenth-century pietist emphasis on personal conversion to the Sartrean concept of authenticity, which passes through Kierkegaard’s philosophy of becoming. In the process, she comes to characterize existentialism as an ethics of responsibility determined by the subject’s libidinal transformation, the ever-renewed commitment to take on the task of assuming “one’s situation in all its unruliness and its unfinished character” (182).

Asceticism · Christianity · Epistemology · Existentialism · Humanism · Protestantism · Subject (documents) · Theology · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices