Anxious angels

Existentialism was one of the most important influences on twentieth-century thought, especially in the period between the 1920s and early 1960s. Best known in its atheistic representatives such as Sartre, it also numbered many significant religious thinkers. Anxious Angels is a critical introduction to these religious existentialists, who are treated as a coherent group in their own right and not merely as derivative of secular existentialism, and it is shown that they constitute a distinctive voice in the history of modern religious thought. Written for students unfamiliar with the primary sources, it summarizes and comments on the existential element in each of the major figures concerned, from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky through to Tillich, Bultmann and Marcel, and includes less familiar representatives of the group such as Berdyaev, Shestov and Unamuno. Their interest in questions of language and communication and political and social life is also explored, and it is argued that they continue to merit attention in an era of postmodernity.