Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin

“Mahn boldly uses Kierkegaard to rehabilitate the concept ‘sin’ for a postmodern audience sensitive to the fissures in human experience. Mahn’s Kierkegaard situates the reader between confession and Eucharist, provoking her to experience blessedness through the anguished awareness of human fallibility. Mahn’s own evocative and paradoxical discourse beautifully exhibits how the blessedness of rejoicing in the love of Christ is tensively related to the possibility of being offended by it.”–Lee C. Barrett, author of Kierkegaard

“Jason Mahn takes on the daunting task of tracing the themes of fallibility, finitude, and fault through the Kierkegaardian corpus, showing how attention to human failings becomes a surer path to redemption than direct praise of virtue, God, or grace. He does a marvelous job of showing how ‘anxiety,’ ‘leveling,’ ‘death,’ ‘paradox,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘chatter,’ and ‘self-choice’ are less portals to modern existentialism than preliminaries to Christian salvation.” –Edward F. Mooney, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Syracuse University, and President of the North American Kierkegaard Society

“The great both/and of Kierkegaard’s writings is, Mahn shows us, the both/and of the human situation–fated and free in our errant lives. Mahn’s Kierkegaard, like Augustine, lays bare the reality of sin as ‘a disease that infests us long before we choose it.’ Only out of the sustained encounter with this reality, Mahn argues, does the ‘human at full register’ emerge. At last a writer whose sure-footed exegesis unveils the fine logic behind Kierkegaard’s theoretical hesitations!”—Vanessa Rumble, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Boston College

“Mahn makes a careful, complex eploration of the notion of “fortunate fallibility” that reveals how danish philosopher Kierkegaard conceived of the relationship between human vulnerability and Christian faith.”–CHOICE

“Mahn boldly uses Kierkegaard to rehabilitate the concept ‘sin’ for a postmodern audience sensitive to the fissures in human experience. Mahn’s Kierkegaard situates the reader between confession and Eucharist, provoking her to experience blessedness through the anguished awareness of human fallibility. Mahn’s own evocative and paradoxical discourse beautifully exhibits how the blessedness of rejoicing in the love of Christ is tensively related to the possibility of being offended by it.”–Lee C. Barrett, author of Kierkegaard

“Jason Mahn takes on the daunting task of tracing the themes of fallibility, finitude, and fault through the Kierkegaardian corpus, showing how attention to human failings becomes a surer path to redemption than direct praise of virtue, God, or grace. He does a marvelous job of showing how ‘anxiety,’ ‘leveling,’ ‘death,’ ‘paradox,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘chatter,’ and ‘self-choice’ are less portals to modern existentialism than preliminaries to Christian salvation.” –Edward F. Mooney, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Syracuse University, and President of the North American Kierkegaard Society

“The great both/and of Kierkegaard’s writings is, Mahn shows us, the both/and of the human situation–fated and free in our errant lives. Mahn’s Kierkegaard, like Augustine, lays bare the reality of sin as ‘a disease that infests us long before we choose it.’ Only out of the sustained encounter with this reality, Mahn argues, does the ‘human at full register’ emerge. At last a writer whose sure-footed exegesis unveils the fine logic behind Kierkegaard’s theoretical hesitations!”—Vanessa Rumble, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Boston College

“Mahn makes a careful, complex eploration of the notion of “fortunate fallibility” that reveals how danish philosopher Kierkegaard conceived of the relationship between human vulnerability and Christian faith.”–CHOICE