Christian Discourses

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Christian Discourses

Author	Søren Kierkegaard
Original title	Christelige Taler
Translator	Walter Lowrie (1940) Howard Hong and Edna Hong (1997)
Language	Danish
Series	Second authorship (Discourses)
Genre	Christianity, psychology
Publisher	C.A. Reitzel
Publication date	Apr 26, 1848
Publication place	Denmark
Published in English	1940 – first English translation
Media type	paperback
Pages	300
ISBN	9780691140780
Preceded by	Works of Love
Followed by	The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

Christian Discourses (Danish: Christelige Taler) is a book by Søren Kierkegaard originally published in Danish in 1848.

Søren Kierkegaard asked how the burden can be light if the suffering is heavy in his 1847 book Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits. He also said the happiness of eternity still outweighs even the heaviest temporal suffering in the same book. These statements were paradoxical. A year later, he said 1848 was the richest and most fruitful year he had experienced as an author.^[1] Christian Discourses was published on April 26, 1848, under Kierkegaard's own name. He makes similar statements in this book. Hardship procures hope. The poorer you become the richer you make others. Adversity is prosperity. He also writes about the eminent pagan killing God and then flying high over the abyss and spiritual communism.

His twenty-eight discourses are divided into four equal sections of seven discourses, moving his reader from paganism to the suffering Christian and then turning polemical in his third section, and he finally gets the single individual before God in his final section.