On May 5, 1813, Søren Kierkegaard was born in a well-off home in the northern European town of Copenhagen. The Great Dane's works have found their way woven into fiction and philosophy, especially via that of the 20th-century Existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre.

Eons away from that threatening morning in Manhattan, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis continues to stay in plain sight. It provokes an existential question: Can time run out?

Yom Kippur arrives to remind us that time is limited. We beat our chests, the Jewish defibrillation, to revive our hearts, to awaken ourselves to our own swift passage. Today, though, on this day, it is our privilege to be alive.

As I was listening to His Holiness, a question sprung full-blown to my mind: "Can, and if so, how, can those who have lost their compassion, or never had it to begin with, regain it?

There seems to be a belief that "faith" is the rejection of the world as it is; a retreat in to fantasy and wishful thinking. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

Ask two Buddhists about what they believe, and you won't just get two different answers -- you might get three or four. On the one hand, the sheer size and diversity of the Buddhist tradition makes it impossible to say what "Buddhists" think.

The European By Alexander Görlach Alexander Görlach of The European sat down with the German writer and intellectual Martin Walser to discuss th...

But there is more going on than mere survival and reproduction. Jesus is an existential question mark for what we hold most true, good and beautiful in the human drama.