A personal note - my two children were lucky enough to have Jamie Lorentzen as a AP English teacher during their time at Red Wing High School. But not only is he one of the best teachers you will ever run across, he's also a distinguished author and scholar. In his latest book, he discusses how the "writing styles of American writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) complement each other, especially their humor, irony, penchants for paradox, and passions for imagery and poetics. In addition, their works similarly address issues of the world and time. Esthetic, ethical, social, philosophical, and theological paths on which they walk reveal similar footprints. World historical circumstances to which they were responding in their time and to which they continue to respond in our time are not dissimilar. Melville's and Kierkegaard's rebounding echoes reverberate in our highly charged and polarized times, speaking especially to the timeless conundrum of what Kierkegaard calls the disastrous confounding of politics and religion and what Melville calls drunken Christianity-namely, the intoxicated mixing of worldly issues with otherworldly issues without care paid to maintaining necessary ethical distinctions." - Randy
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