“There are circles of Kierkegaard scholarship, some of it academically solemn and much of it more in the nature of fan clubs. One can only guess what he would make of professors who lecture on his contempt for professors and lecturing, or of admirers who have made him, of all things he unremittingly despised, popular. Apart from the stolid academics and enthusiastic fans, reading Kierkegaard is for many people an “experience,” preferably to be indulged early in life before moving on to the ambiguities and compromises of adulthood that we resign ourselves to believing is the real world. A well-read acquaintance of a certain age says that he remembers fondly his “Kierkegaard period.” He was about nineteen at the time, and it followed closely upon his “Holden Caulfield period,” referring to the young rebel of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. In his view—shared, I have no doubt, by many others—Kierkegaard provides a spiritual and intellectual rush, a frisson of youthful rebellion, a flirtation with radical refusal of the world as it is. Kierkegaard is, in sum, a spiritually and intellectually complexified way of joining Holden Caulfield in declaring that established ways of thinking and acting are “phony” to the core, which declaration certifies, by way of dramatic contrast, one’s most singular “authenticity.” Such certification does wonders for what today is called self-esteem. It is a way of thinking and acting that has the further cachet of coming with an impressive philosophical title: existentialism.” — Richard John Neuhaus (First Things )