ABSTRACT
Sylvia Walsh's Living Christianly was published in 2005 by the Pennsylvania State University Press. Walsh focuses particularly on the writings from what she classifies as Soren Kierkegaard's "second" period as an author. Walsh seeks to show not only that the writings of this second period are in need of further examination, but also that they provide a more compelling account of what Christian living entails for Kierkegaard. Walsh carefully argues for the overall shape of this Kierkegaardian dialectic. Walsh provides an effective analysis of the descriptions in The Sickness unto Death regarding despair as sin. Walsh then explains that the consciousness of sin, for Kierkegaard, first takes shape as an "existential awareness." Walsh does affirm that, with regard to Christian living, Kierkegaard's inverse dialectic provides both "a corrective and a challenge to modern as well as postmodern optimism and pessimism.".
