released 5/29/2026
Playwright Tim McIntosh (My Name Is Søren Kierkegaard) discusses his interest in Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1836), whose life has not — until now — been the subject of any major dramatic artistic work. McIntosh’s self-described obsession with Kierkegaard evolved over time from hero worship to a more complex admiration for the philosopher’s unique contributions to theology. Kierkegaard’s intense focus on the “hidden interiority” of each person’s experience of Christianity and faith continues to cause controversy: some fear that it denies or contradicts the existence of objective truth. McIntosh acknowledges how Kierkegaard’s complexity — often resulting from the multiple voices and even divided perspectives in his written works — fuels this controversy. However, he argues that his insights into “the knowing self” — that is, personal knowledge — are helpful and are reflected in the work of other Christian thinkers and artists as diverse as Michael Polanyi, Karl Barth, and filmmaker Terrence Malik. McIntosh describes his process in writing the play and plans for its production.
The first full production of My Name Is Søren Kierkegaard will be staged July 23–26, 2026, at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga’s Black Box Theatre. It is directed by Frank Mihelich and presented by the New Threads Theatre Company. To learn more about this upcoming production, visit the play’s website.
Interested listeners might enjoy McIntosh’s podcast, The Play’s the Thing.
21 minutes
PREVIEW
The player for the full version of this Feature is only available to current members. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.
duration 20:55
Related reading and listening
- The wise and good Creator — FROM VOL. 139 Matthew Levering points out that what is often missing from the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is an adequate understanding of God’s wisdom and knowledge. (21 minutes)
- The desire for truth — In this article, Romanus Cessario, O.P., recounts the life, theology, and influence of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274). (38 minutes)
- The collaboration of bodies and minds — F. C. Copleston on Aquinas’s confidence in the embodied nature of knowledge
- Disengagement from the world — Nicholas Carr encourages us to consider how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world and whether — like a good tool — they present a more inviting world or close us off from that world. (30 minutes)
- “If there is no God, all is permitted” — Gary Saul Morson explores the consequences of belief and disbelief in God through Russian literature. (51 minutes)
- Moral reasoning and human flourishing — Tim McIntosh describes moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s intellectual conversion to a synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Christianity, best embodied in Thomism. (44 minutes)
- The “sovereign uselessness of moral reflection” — Calling on the wisdom of St. Augustine, Oliver O’Donovan reminds his listeners that all knowledge participates in the eternal Logos of God and is rooted in love, not disinterested moral judgement.(Lecture 1 of 3; 52 minutes)
- Beyond a reasonable doubt — From a 1980 interview with Ken Myers, Mortimer J. Adler discusses his argument that belief in the existence of God is rational. (14 minutes)
- Heaven and earth are full of His glory — Gerald R. McDermott examines the typological tradition of the Church, particularly through Jonathan Edwards’s thought, and he argues for a recovery of the Christian understanding of the universe as an “immense Trinitarian symbol.” (61 minutes)
- A false dichotomy — In this conversation from 2009, Dallas Willard (1934–2013) discusses the truth of spiritual knowledge and its epistemological validity. (63 minutes)
- All trees, no forest — Richard Weaver on the attenuating of knowledge
- Christian belief as real knowledge — Dallas Willard on the modern divorce between faith and knowledge
- Humility and moral knowledge — FROM VOL. 149 Steven L. Porter discusses The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, an unfinished manuscript (which he helped to complete) by the late philosopher Dallas Willard. (22 minutes)
- Harbinger of disorder — Mark Mitchell on Michael Polanyi’s recognition of the dangerous dead-end of materialistic reductionism
- Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
- The vice of curiosity — Stanley Hauerwas on the warning from Paul Griffiths about desiring to own knowledge
- University or “utiliversity”? — In this essay, Reinhard Hütter examines in depth John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University and argues that its insights and prescriptions are urgently relevant to the current status of higher education. (87 minutes)
- Thinking Together — Alan Jacobs discusses some principles he’s compiled to help us think well (and charitably) in our cultural context, and he warns us to be attentive to the ways technology displaces previously fixed communities. (53 minutes)
- Students as arbiters of knowledge — FROM VOL. 94 Tim Clydesdale discusses the experience of freshmen year at college, suggesting that by that time students have been effectively inoculated against a love of knowledge. (21 minutes)
- Pathways of the Mind: The Joy of the Essay — Alan Jacobs thinks Christians should embrace the potential in the literary form of the essay, because of the way it corresponds to the navigation and journey of a Christian life. (48 minutes)
- In the Image of Our Devices — Nicholas Carr considers how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world. (66 minutes)
- The law of faith and of love — Oliver O’Donovan compares St. Augustine’s interpretation of Psalm 119 with that of others, revealing Augustine’s more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the life of faith that the psalmist explores. (64 minutes)
- How paintings convey meaning — FROM VOL. 121 Theologian Walter Hansen and painter Bruce Herman question contemporary conceptions of meaning that confine it to the verbal or consider visual and verbal meaning to be completely exclusive. (20 minutes)
- Moral knowledge of reality — Oliver O’Donovan argues that admiration is the fundamental form of knowing the world, as we cannot know fully those elements of reality (“bare facts”) that contain no significance for us. (Lecture 2 of 3; 55 minutes)
- The recovery of an integrated ecology — In this essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. (57 minutes)
- Sacramental Poetics — Poet and Eastern Orthodox believer Scott Cairns explains how a good poem functions like an icon: it assists the process of our becoming aware of what is real, and it is generative in the ways it keeps opening up new understandings. (56 minutes)
- Joy & sorrow, destitution & abundance — In this poetry reading and talk, poet Christian Wiman discusses his own faith journey and how his struggles worked themselves into his poems. (40 minutes)
- Excluding cranks and dabblers — Drusilla Scott on Michael Polanyi’s insistence that the “community of science” required authority
- How discovery happens — Esther Lightcap Meek on Michael Polanyi’s account of scientific discovery
- The personal element in all knowing — Mark Mitchell connects key aspects of Michael Polanyi’s conception of knowledge with Matthew Crawford’s insistence that real knowing involves more than technique. (34 minutes)
- An impoverished anthropology — FROM VOL. 146 Mark Mitchell asks whether there is anything that truly binds Americans together beyond their commitment to self-creation. (34 minutes)
- Making contact with reality — FROM VOL. 139 Esther Lightcap Meek discusses the realism of philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi. (23 minutes)
- Knowing the world through the body — FROM VOL. 76 Professor Martin X. Moleski explains why Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) left his career in science to become a philosopher. (16 minutes)
- Steward of knowledge vs. autonomous knower — FROM VOL. 66 Esther Lightcap Meek challenges the modernist view of knowledge, which prefers the figure of the autonomous knower to the figure of a steward of knowledge acquired in part from others. (15 minutes)
- Wonder, being, skepticism, and reason — FROM VOL. 135 Matthew Levering talks about the long and rich tradition of reasoning about God. (23 minutes)
- The need to recollect ourselves as whole persons — In this 2016 lecture, John F. Crosby explores key personalist insights found in the thinking of John Henry Newman and Romano Guardini. (60 minutes)
- “A sign of contradiction” — In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)
- Nature’s intelligibility — In this lecture, Christopher Blum argues that scientists need to regain a full appreciation of nature’s intelligibility, as they are apt to lose sight of reality due to the reductionism produced by their theories. (31 minutes)
- Submission to mathematical truth — In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)
- Embodied knowledge — FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)
- Science’s need for philosophy and revelation — D. Stephen Long explores a consistent theme in the work of theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar: the relationship between Christianity, modernity, and secularity. (46 minutes)
- Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
- How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
- William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
- Approaches to knowing — FROM VOL. 104 Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes)
- The integration of theoretical and mythic intelligence — FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes)
- The ecstasy of the act of knowing — Theologian Paul Griffiths situates our creaturely knowing within the framework of the relation between God and Creation
- On The Abolition of Man — FROM VOL. 154 Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
- Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
- Lessons from Leviticus — The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)