I was thirteen when strange questions seemed to be strangling me: how do I know that God exists? How do I know that there is anything real beyond my mental thoughts of it? I knew of no one I could turn to even to voice the questions.
Eventually, I figured out that the questions weren’t silly; they were philosophical. Thoughtful responses to them had shaped whole cultural epochs across the disciplines. This astounded me!I found out that our Modern Age touts a philosophy that disavows philosophy. It robs us of our philosophical birthright. It both spawns and dismisses our doubts about knowing and the real. It touts an approach to knowing and the real which actually obstructs our work, damaging ourselves and the world.
The day I learned that one could actually study philosophy in college, it took me exactly twelve hours to redirect the course of my life to do so. Philosophy seemed to me the most important thing to seek to understand. And since philosophy shapes all other disciplines, studying it promised to integrate my life meaningfully.
My quest for the real led through a BA, MA and PhD, and into Academia. But I had to work out my own every-day responses to my early questions. This is what I am doing in my books. And the books are meant for all of us, because all of us share the questions and sense the philosophical crisis of the Modern Age.
So I am a professional philosopher working beyond the ivory tower with people in the streets—where philosophizing ought to happen, to address people’s heartfelt but often thwarted longing for the real. I want to share with others what I needed desperately but took decades to find.I have found a deeply healing, integrative, life-reorienting approach to our core philosophical questions about knowing and the real. And since our philosophical approach is foundational to everything else we do, this philosophical approach has been proven to positively and concretely impacts every other venture we undertake. I’d like the opportunity to share it with you and your team.
Esther Lightcap Meek (BA Cedarville College, MA Western Kentucky University, PhD Temple University) is Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Geneva College, in Western Pennsylvania. She is a Fellow Scholar with the Fujimura Institute, an Associate Fellow with the Kirby Laing Center for Public Theology, and a member of the Polanyi Society. She offers courses for Theopolis Institute, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and Regent College. Esther now works from Steubenville, Ohio.
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