To Be(come) Love Itself: Charity as Acquired Originality

In 1849, Kierkegaard published The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses, which were closely followed by two discourses on the woman who was a sinner, published in 1849 and 1850. I argue that these discourses are intended to set the stage to learn how to embody Christian love from the woman. Kierkegaard’s claims about what is required to teach Christian virtue imply that the woman becomes more than loving, she becomes love. I explore his notion of acquired originality and how applied philosophical concepts such as automaticity and skillful coping elucidate this notion.

Being-Disrupted and Being-Disruptive: Coping Students in Uncertain Times

In the light of Martin Heidegger and Hubert Dreyfus’s concepts of being-in-the-world and skillful coping, this article addresses disruptions students face in modern society. Such disruptions involve pressure for achievement and lack of belonging to communities. In the discussion, the article presents the terms being-disrupted and being-disruptive. These terms outline ways students could cope with disruptions in their everyday practices. These practices include students’ relations to society and other people. Further elements addressed in the discussion are students’ interrelatedness with the world, their moods, and willingness to take risks. The article is part of the research project “A Comparative Study of Disruptive Behavior Between Schools in Norway and the United States.”

Skillful Coping

This chapter examines and accounts for skillful coping and its complexity in a way that linear and staged models cannot. The authors propose a morphogenetic approach of enskilment that surmounts the limitations of such stepwise progressions from novice to expert. Based on rich empirical data that follow forwards the process of one author’s craft apprenticeship over time, the chapter shows that becoming enskilled is an ongoing process that unfolds against the background of practice. This reveals a recursive, multidirectional pattern of movement that is specific to each practitioner, depending upon his or her prior experiences and circumstances. Thus the pattern of enskilment may be shared by a range of skillful copers, but is given its specificity by each practitioner’s particular background practice(s).