Abstract
Through stories of her own experiences with death, the recent loss of loved ones, the author seeks to elucidate understanding regarding the phenomenology of grace and its educational signification in the light of human temporality, relationality and being-towards life as well as death.
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Notes
- 1.
Although such questions are not at all unrelated.
- 2.
This classical notion of the purpose of education, from Cicero, is one that Martha Nussbaum (1997) contemporarily takes up in: Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. This conception of education rooted as it is in Socrates and Plato and the human quest for and realisation of the good, the true and the beautiful (and Aristotle’s good life constituted by a life in pursuit of the good) implicitly connects it, in this way, to grace and its experience, it would seem.
- 3.
Personal correspondence.
- 4.
See, for example, Molly Quinn’s 2019 edited collection on Doll’s legacy, and Hongyu Wang (2016) on his pedagogy.
- 5.
My dissertation, as well, while I did not directly take up the question of grace, I think was implicitly related to it, entitled: Education, Faith and the Critique of Reason. Much of the substance of this work was later published in: Quinn, M. (2001). Going Out, Not Knowing Whither: Education, The Upward Journey and the Faith of Reason. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
- 6.
Bussey highlights this quality in describing grace phenomenologically as well: “Grace, as a phenomenological experience, invites us to walk lightly in the world, play, laugh, pray and love together as embodied beings with deep reserves of culture and spirituality” (Personal correspondence).
- 7.
Some of this was also illumined in Trueit’s role as discussant of a symposium at the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies Conference in Melbourne, Australia, December, 12, 2018, on the generative and generous gifts of William E. Doll, Jr., to curriculum studies.
- 8.
Use of this term references translations of Heidegger’s work (1927/1962) concerning our “ownmost” possibility or the being-towards-death of dasein (literally, being-there, or the being that is human).
- 9.
It is interesting to note that in my translation of Heidegger herein, grace is translated as “the saving power”.
- 10.
Heidegger (1954/1977) illumines this meaning of truth etymologically via its Greek origins in aleitheia: a-leitheia, not being hidden, out of hiding, or un-concealment, related to this notion of the presencing of what presences, the unveiling of being.
- 11.
I want to acknowledge receipt of this jewel on grace by Lamott offered here due to Dr Darla Linville, a friend and colleague who knew I was working on grace and who thoughtfully passed it along to me.
- 12.
Such hearkens again to the classical notion of education as cultivating our humanity; the realisation of the good, the true and the beautiful; Socrates’ examination of life, in the way of worthy living, the pursuit of justice central to this quest. All such implicates grace (or grace implicated therein, that which makes education perhaps possible?)—the experience of such—as actually possibly somehow indelibly tied to, inextricably bound up in, the project of education. How shall we then live … together … on the earth … under the sky?
- 13.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, cited in Huebner (1999, p. 402).
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Quinn, M. (2020). Between Presence and Absence: Living and Learning Grace in the Face of Death. In: Bussey, M., Mozzini-Alister, C. (eds) Phenomenologies of Grace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40623-3_5
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