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"Existentialism and Father Abraham:
A Colloquy with Kierkegaard on the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley"
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Abstract –
One of the more agreeable novelties of these dreary times is the series of interfaith meetings that go on in every American city, reaching their climax during Brotherhood Week. Agreeable in their intentions, that is, for the sad fact must be recorded that they are generally flaccid in form and vacuous in content. Why is this so? Is it because of the unpalatable (to some palates, anyway) truth that actually the areas of disagreement between Judaism and Christianity are infinitely greater than the constantly asserted areas of agreement? When you disagree on so much and agree on so little, and your comments must be made in accents of perfect harmony and brotherly cooperation, on such occasions conversation must inevitably seem a lost art.
I discovered this for myself while traveling on my favorite train: the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley. The Yazoo and Mississippi is an Existentialist railway. That it exists in anxiety is proclaimed by long, throaty blasts sounded on the whistle as it jolts along towards each crossing. It makes the traveler conscious of the temporality of life by its habitual violation of the timetable. The round, honest face of its black engine reminds us of the time when machinery, before its refinement in the atomic warhead, was amenable to human purpose. The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley evokes the romantic nostalgia of contemporary men who long for a past time when the individual existed and counted for something.
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