Kierkegaard's Fear & Trembling

Christopher Utter is Associate Director of the Lincoln Scholars program and term professorial lecturer in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He regularly teaches courses in the Lincoln Scholars program as well as upper level political theory courses. His research focuses mainly on classical political philosophy with a particular interest in the problem of theory and practice in Plato and Aristotle.

Mary Townsend is an associate professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, Queens, NY. Her 2017 book, The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic was named required reading by University of Pennsylvania’s Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and her academic work on Plato, Beauvoir, and the American abolitionist Julia Ward Howe has appeared in Hypatia, Polis, and Social Philosophy Today.

Jacob Howland has published five books and roughly 60 scholarly articles and review essays on the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Kierkegaard, the Talmud, the Holocaust, ideological tyranny, and other subjects. His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic.

Amy Apfel Kass (1940 – 2015) was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Senior Lecturer Emerita in the humanities at the University of Chicago, and coeditor of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. She was an award-winning teacher of classic texts.

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and the Madden-Jewett Chair at AEI. He was the chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. He has been engaged for more than 40 years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advances and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues.

Mary Elizabeth Halper is Dean of the Humanities at Hertog program and a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. Previously, she was Associate Director of the Hertog Foundation. She graduated with B.A.s in Philosophy and Classics from the University of Dallas and has since been devoted to liberal education in various forms.