Finding Peaks and Valleys in a Flat World

Mark Ellingsen has written a creative book showing how insights from the Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) can be directly and significantly relevant for us today. Ellingsen skillfully describes our contemporary culture, with the famed image used by Tom Friedman to describe the globalized economy, as a “flat world,” marked by individualization and self-concern where people live in “valleys’ of sensuality and as mere spectators of life. He shows that internet life only exacerbates these ways of living. To understand, Ellingsen uses Kierkegaard’s images of stages of life as: 1) Aesthetic, including boredom and a search for meaning which does not come; 2) Ethical, which can be a “peak” when one focuses on what life might be and 3) Religious life where the highest good for life can be found: concentrating on one’s self in relation to the infinite. Jesus Christ is the “absolute paradox” who as God become a human person makes it possible to be liberated by God and find true happiness through being totally dependent on God. The worthwhile life—“peaks”—is life transformed by Christ, by grace. Christian life is “sheer gentleness, grace, lovingkindness, and compassion” (Kierkegaard).
Ellingsen provides helpful questions so we can examine our stages of life. He draws on brain research in illuminating ways. Becoming Christian in a flat world is a “leap of faith.” For Ellingsen, “only a leap of faith into the loving arms of God can break the monotonous meaninglessness of life in the flat world.”
This original and engaging book touches us all. It calls us to honest self-examination and provides a vision of life filled with “meaning, excitement, and a sense of mission.”

Donald K. McKim
Emeritus Professor at Memphis Theological Seminary and Editor at Westminster John Knox Press


COVID might have accelerated our feelings of isolation and anxiety, but Ellingsen rightly points to a more fundamental cause for our sense of meaninglessness as Americans -- our increasingly "flat" world. Thankfully, and from a most unlikely source, the Danish philosopher/theologian Kierkegaard, Ellingsen also finds a creative, if controversial, way forward. Fascinating, provocative, readable, timely, here is a book that will help all of us recalibrate our lives.

Robert K. Johnston
Professor of Theology and Culture
Fuller Theological Seminary


[...] Ellingsen makes creative use of Kierkegaard's timeless insights in this beautiful book, which also provides a powerful critique of Friedman's ideas--as well as the ideas of all those other commentators who mindlessly embrace the life of human despair that is being laid out for us by the seemingly relentless socioeconomic forces at work in the new era of a globalized world economy.

[Extract from book review appearing in the "Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies," Vol. 35, 2023. (pp. 199-202). Reviewer: Pamela W. Proietti, Chaplain St. Paul Elders Services, Kaukauna, WI.]