Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 5. A prolific author, he produced an impressive series of books devoted to philosophical and religious themes, including a parallel series published under various pseudonyms. He is perhaps best known for his critical engagement with the guiding values of Protestant Christendom in the mid-nineteenth century. Fearing that Christianity had become dangerously enmeshed in the bourgeois malaise sweeping Europe at the time, he urged his readers to aspire to lives of greater passion, intensity, inwardness, and faith. In a sustained provocation that won him few contemporary admirers, he vowed to reintroduce the practice of Christianity into Christendom.

Kierkegaard's most influential pseudonymous work, Fear and Trembling (1843), challenges the primacy assigned to the universality of ethical life. With specific reference to the biblical story of Abraham on Mount Moriah, Kierkegaard raises the possibility...