Esther Lightcap Meek QUOTES

1 " If one knows, one cares; if one does not care, one does not know. "

2 " There is another way that longing comes to expression. It is in a sense of wonder or adventure. It is right to distinguish this, as Palmer does, from selfish curiosity: this is a longing for the real that implies my readiness to engage it, and that for its own sake, and for the sake of the wonder of what will transpire when knower and known meet in creative communion.
Palmer says that “knowledge contains its own morality, that it begins not in a neutrality but in a place of passion within the human soul.” Indeed, to rekindle the longing to know is thus to invite the real. But now this starts to lean toward the active side of desire."
(from "Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology" by Esther Lightcap Meek) "

― Esther Lightcap Meek

3 " The well-known biblical story of the Magi who journey to find the Christ child and to bring gifts offers an emblematic story of knowing. They are not called wise men for nothing! nor is it a meaningless accident that we use the word epiphany in referring to a moment of insight. Epiphany is the name of the church season in which we celebrate God's revealing himself to these Gentiles--and to us. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

4 " Consider the Magi. Arabian astrologers, for years they had bound themselves to study what they half-understood. They studied the planets and stars, not for mere facts and figures about the planets, but because they pursued deeper meaning. They were not "collecting data," building a bank of comprehensive information. They attended to the stars, we may surmise, in a loving and wondering search for wisdom: wisdom of the sort that comes to expression in a harrowing pilgrimage together beyond Arabia, across trackless wastes, across tense racial and political boundaries, into the unknown to find a foreign king to whom they deemed a certain star to belong, a king worth worshipping with their best gifts--treasures themselves fraught with portent. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

5 " They bound themselves covenantally to the yet-to-be-known, in their growing expertise, to invite its gracious disclosure of deeper meaning. They bound themselves to that as-yet-unknown reality in taking up such a journey. What they actually found surprisingly transformed their half-understood inquiries as reality swept in and swept them up. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

6 " Covenantally binding ourselves (behaving!) includes commitment to the as-yet undiscovered reality, love, patience, humility, listening beyond our previously conceived categories, personal openness, and embracing with hope the half-understood promise of the real, to the end of communion and . . . friendship. All knowing is, at least paradigmatically, knowing whom. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology

7 " Philosophy is difficult, like looking directly at the tip of your nose is difficult! We rely in every act of knowing on foundational philosophical beliefs. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People

8 " A pilgrimage of knowing can be a journey of course corrections. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

9 " Insight isn’t informational; it is transformational. It is a knowing event. A change transpires. Understanding this distinction makes a big difference to all our knowing ventures. The moment of insight transforms the knower, the known, and the knowing. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

10 " And what indwelling looks like is this: relying on clues “subsidiarily” to shape a complex focal pattern. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

11 " The key to success in temporary analysis is twofold. First: we must remember it is temporary. Focal analysis is not knowledge. Successfully returning to subsidiary indwelling to looking from our practices and skills and analyses to their meaningful integrative bearing on the world—that is knowing. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

12 " And I shared with all Westerners a Greek heritage: If ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, I think it fair to say that skepticism was the blanket the baby came wrapped in. How can we be sure we know anything at all?2 It "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People

13 " A major reason, I believe, is this: It does not sit comfortably with a person to affirm, and try to live, the claim that we have access to no objective (outside of myself) truth. People are implicitly aware that this claim calls for as much justification as the claim that we do have access to objective truth. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People

14 " We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, “content,” true statements—true statements justified by other true statements. And while this isn’t exactly false, we tend to have a vision of knowledge as being only this. We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information—and we’re done—educated, trained, expert, certain. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

15 " Along with this knowledge-as-information approach, we tend to be “epistemological dualists.” We distinguish knowledge from belief, facts from values, reason from faith, theory from application, thought from emotion, mind from body, objective from subjective, science from art. We readily overlay the first members of each pair—knowledge, facts, reason, theory, mind, objectivity, and science. And we set each first member over against its “opposite.” We think we need to keep knowledge “pure” from these “opposites”.
Epistemological dualism cuts us as knowers down into disconnected compartments unable to work together—information here, body there, emotions in a third place. It depersonalizes us at the moment of one of our greatest opportunities for personhood—coming to know. It dispels any sense of adventure. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

16 " We are epistemological beings: we live out an orientation to knowing, whether we “know” it or not. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

17 " I have come to believe we should think of knower and known as persons in relationship, where knowing is the relationship. This relationship has covenantal dimensions. By that I mean that the knower pledges her- or himself to the yet-to-be-known, the way a groom pledges himself to a bride. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

18 " What’s more, in this view, we ourselves are not God; we are creaturely knowers. Our glory as humans is to know from a particular place and orientation, to journey toward what we do not yet know. Always we are on the way. We are on the way with respect to knowing God as well as knowing our world. We understand partially. We know as we give ourselves and as we are known. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

19 " Knowing is a pilgrimage. It requires taking personal responsibility, born of love, to pledge allegiance to what we do not yet know. It requires relying on seemingly opaque guidance to venture into the darkness of half-understanding. We invite its gracious and surprising self-disclosure, seeking to indwell its clues to make sense of a hidden pattern. We risk our forever being changed. It is an adventure. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

20 " What we think of the one shapes what we think of the other. If you find that you think there is nothing more to reality than what lab experiments uncover or our eyes see, a little additional thought should show that this claim itself is not the sort of thing that lab experiments could ever uncover or eyes ever see. "

― Esther Lightcap Meek , A Little Manual for Knowing

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