In reading Esther Lightcap Meek’s “The Other,” I had the surprising experience of being transported back to my own experience as a young father of a newborn, some thirty-four years ago.[1] To say the least, this reaction is unusual for me when engaging with philosophical papers. Meek’s work has often stimulated, resonated, surprised, confused, and even overwhelmed, but in this moment, it awakened my memories, and her use of the analogy of a mother’s gaze as the epistemological venture shifted my attention from analyzing to imagining a mother looking down on her child.
This response was more than the recollection of a memory. It was more like stepping back into the feelings I had as a father watching my wife looking at our young son. The experience of recalling this memory moved me so much that I asked my wife what it was like to look into the face of her newborn child. It was stunning for me to see an expression of almost immediate emotional recall come to her face. “I’m sure curious about why you are asking the question,” she said, and then she paused before continuing. She found words—“awe” and “enrapturing”—but she had to search for the language that could describe something of the embodied emotional experience. She spoke of mystery and the otherworldly quality of the moment, and I acknowledged that it was a beyond-words experience of knowing. It was evident to both of us that the full experience, as profound as it was, could not be fully described in a way that captured the knowing of that moment.
In this response to Meek’s offering, you have my attempt to hold the analytical and the relational lenses of the experience. Meek asks us to reimagine the knowing encounter between mother and child as a frame for exploring the philosophical encounter with the real. It is a lovely work, linking the abstract task of knowing as a philosophical exercise with our embodied experience of yearning to be known and seen and gazed upon as creatures of flesh and breath. Her desire that we return to a more “natural” philosophy is one that centers the relatedness of the “other” in the knowing venture. Although the usual sense of “natal” simply refers to birthing, Meek extends this into the formation of a person, for we do not become “knowers” in one moment.[2] The encounters between mother and child and the child’s social context shape lifelong patterns of knowing, belonging, and becoming. More significantly for the epistemological task, these encounters shape the experience of a world—one to explore and to be known.
Our task in responding to Meek’s offering is to join and extend her work by exploring the space she has opened to alternative ways of knowing, such as intuition and imagination. As a philosophical theologian, Meek invites us to consider natality and the maternal gaze in the exercise of knowing, and her perspective takes us into a more contemporary epistemology, one that extends knowing through the relatedness of the other (within and between). I will follow her lead and offer interdisciplinary support for her venture by briefly considering the developmental work of theorists such as Lev Vgotsky and the neurobiology work of Iain McGilchrist. Lastly, I will raise some questions about the feminine and masculine assumptions of mothering and fathering related to the biblical text.
In her piece, Meek’s chief argument is that modernity’s focus on utility and mastery over nature has led to a disavowal of rich philosophy and a neglect of profound encounters with the other. Although she does not explicitly frame this modern approach as masculine, she critiques the Cartesian movement that shifted us away from relational, embodied knowing and toward an emphasis on the autonomous self’s agency to create its world. Meek contrasts the deep connection experienced in a mother’s joyful embrace with the modern age’s tendency to suspend the experience of the other within our philosophy, emphasizing a reasoned knowing that is analytical, internal, abstract, and in pursuit of certainty.
Meek is not alone in her critique of modernity and abstraction or in her pursuit of an epistemology that is more embodied, relational, inclusive, and practical. Scholars like Willie James Jennings, who critiques Whiteness, and Ted Smith, in The End of Theological Education, raise similar concerns. They advocate for an epistemology that integrates academic learning with practical application and community engagement. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel also argues for the inseparability of true knowledge from bodily experience, challenging the more traditional dualistic epistemological splits (e.g., mind/body, spirit/matter, rational/emotional).[3]
Meek contends that restoring this more whole philosophical orientation is crucial for addressing the cultural and philosophical challenges of the modern age and for healing the fragmentation inherent in the modern. This might be considered hyperbole by some, but I believe Meek wants more than a simple change of our conceptual focus—she wants a paradigmatic shift. She is asking that we re-reorient our map of the world and how it works and return to our capacity to see the real in a dynamic relational cosmos. With a rigid focus on the pursuit of certainty, we lose the ease of seeing, smiling, and knowing in a healing way. Instead, we look to grasp, control, analyze, and consume, which only deepens our sense of emptiness and purposelessness. This becomes a form of knowing without vitality and regenerative energy. However, we must be careful here to avoid the default frame of pitting analysis against relatedness and instead aim for coherence (or consilience). Collecting and controlling data cannot be the end of our pursuits in the sciences, but they can be tools for reengaging a related knowing, one that will always hold a degree of uncertainty and mystery.
Developmental Psychology and Philosophical Theology Integration
In developmental psychology, social constructivist theory, as proposed by scholars like Vygotsky, emphasizes the crucial role of social interactions, particularly with caregivers, in the development of self-awareness and self-consciousness.[4] According to this social constructivist framework, infants have a limited sense of self, and they are unaware of themselves as separate selves. Through the interactions with their caregivers—especially their mothers—infants gradually become self-aware and develop a self-identity. Responsive and attuned caregiving provides emotional consistency, soothing, and nurturing that helps infants develop a secure attachment and a positive sense of self. The mother’s gaze and touch provide the context and the emotional climate for the young child to imitate the parent’s safe and warm relating.
The relationship at this stage is asymmetrical, as the child receives from the mother or father more than they give materially, but the bond is formed. The bond forms from mother to child, while the child’s bond to the mother is still developing. The mother experiences a type of knowing not fully accessible to the infant but present in the child’s awareness through touch and the emotional climate. These are the first knowing experiences for the nascent human outside the womb, as the infant must reorient to a world outside the mother’s body.
From an epistemological standpoint, this developmental perspective underscores the relational nature of knowing and becoming known, both to oneself and to others. It supports the idea that the apparatus of knowing is co-constructed through social interactions and relationships rather than solely acquired through individual cognitive processes. One could argue that we are by design relational knowers, unable to survive in our natural environment without the protection, provision, linkage, and imitation of our caregivers. The mother’s gaze and repeated attunement become foundational in shaping the infant’s understanding of themselves and the world. It is only through these early relational experiences of touch, taste, tone, and togetherness that the infant learns to perceive themselves as a separate individual with their own thoughts, feelings, and desires. The secure attunement fosters a stable identity, secure attachments, emotional regulation, critical thinking, and the ability to engage with the world as an independent yet connected knowing self.
Meek and Patriarchy
Meek’s introduction of natality and the maternal gaze into epistemology serves two purposes. First, it highlights the importance of relational experiences in knowing, reconnecting our knowing with the experience of embodied relating. Second, Meek’s play with the mother and child relationship disrupts the dominance and asymmetry of the patriarchy in the knowing venture, reintroducing the idea that our first knowing is of birth, both its physical separation and maternal embrace.
In the modern Western tradition, we have disconnected the maternal body from the venture of knowing and overvalued traditional notions of masculine knowledge—that is, ways of knowing that are linear, analytical, individual, and abstract. Meek shifts our attention toward embodiment and relatedness, emphasizing expressions of gender—not just the feminine but also the maternal. The concepts of the feminine and masculine are often linked to broader cultural, psychological, and biological understandings, whereas maternal and paternal specifically refer to roles associated with motherhood and fatherhood. Our default to dualism can perceive these as opposites and opposing forces such that more of one means less of another. However, I don’t think Meek is simply calling for the feminization of the masculine in the battle for more control and dominance over the paternal. Instead, the introduction of the maternal urges us to consider it in relation to the paternal and the capacity for nurturing, protecting, and generativity within the father’s role.
The current political dialogue around gender and identity has oversimplified the intricate nature of female and male biology, even as it aims to highlight the fluidity of identity and the diversity of gender experiences. As the culture wars have assumed a firm grip on the gender discourse, we’ve neglected the exploration of either the matriarchy or the patriarchy in any depth, thereby failing to value their distinctions or acknowledge the necessity of their interconnection. For our purposes, the simplification and polarization around issues of gender and identity have served to stereotype traditional roles, downplay relational knowing, and overlook the complexity and mystery inherent in these concepts. Meek, in reintroducing the mother’s body in the metaphor of mother and child, does not suggest dismantling patriarchal ways of knowing. Instead, I would argue that she calls for an integration that maintains a clear distinction between these ways of knowing.
Hemisphere Integration
There is neuroscientific evidence that the embodied context of knowing is affected by the ways we engage the world as mothers (females) and fathers (males). Again, we must be cautious to avoid thinking prematurely of this as innate rather as bodies embedded in culture. In “The Master and His Emissary,” Iain McGilchrist highlights the relationship between the brain’s hemispheric dominance and broader cultural trends in modern Western societies. His premise is that the human brain’s two hemispheres have distinct functions and ways of experiencing the world. He makes the case that Western society has increasingly prioritized the left hemisphere’s analytical and mechanistic thinking over the right hemisphere’s holistic and intuitive perspective, leading to cultural imbalances. He believes our philosophies and the Western cultural pursuit of modernity have become increasingly dominated by the abstract and the mechanistic. Consequently, our approach to reality attends to those things we want to control, order, and abstract rather than to connecting, integrating, and contextualizing. McGilchrist does not set the right and left hemispheres up as opposites but as distinct ways to attend that require interaction and integration for us to make sense of the world in our experience, context, and imagination.[5]
Both hemispheres interact and need to constrain and facilitate the other to be most useful for navigating the world effectively. However, McGilchrist suggests that the right hemisphere must remain the master if the relationship between the two hemispheres is to be optimal. The explorative and adaptive focus of the right hemisphere engages the world of experience as a whole—it sees the world more truly as it is—but it is reliant on the left hemisphere’s work to specify how knowing can be useful. We can think of the left hemisphere, then, as a translator—it takes in information from the right hemisphere and tries to make sense of it for purposes of utilization or mastery. For this reason, McGilchrist says the left hemisphere is vulnerable to error—it sometimes gets things a bit mixed up because it lacks context. The left hemisphere’s suggested application of discrete knowledge must then be received by the right hemisphere again to be applied within a given context. For McGilchrist, there is no split or separate brain, even while he identifies the distinct styles of the hemispheres in approaching reality. What he argues is that when prioritizing the left hemisphere in a pursuit for certainty, we are prone to its miscalculation and error. The left hemisphere’s pursuit of closure or certainty, rather than the exploration of the right hemisphere, creates a vulnerability for premature foreclosure. McGilchrist’s call, then, is for a reintegration of the two hemispheres’ perspectives to restore balance and social and cultural harmony.
You might find some irony in my embrace of McGilchrist’s language of right and left hemisphere and his choice to privilege the right to be “master” over the left. However, he appears to avoid the default of dualism in his pursuit to understand how the hemispheres work together. But how might we apply McGilchrist’s work in light of our effort to consider patriarchy and the roles of the mother and child and modernity? McGilchrist highlights general trends in how males and females utilize their brain hemispheres, suggesting that females may have a slightly stronger integration between the two hemispheres, whereas males may lean more toward left hemisphere functions. This gendering of hemispheres is not without questions, but he is making a descriptive assessment not an innate one. McGilchrist suggests that although we can see trends, both females and males use both hemispheres, and these trends have both cultural and biological influences.
McGilchrist’s work appears to strengthen Meek’s explicit assertion that a more abstract and analytical emphasis has distorted our knowing venture in its pursuit of control and mastery. Moreover, this distortion can be associated with a way of engaging the world that is vulnerable to error in its building of models for use. If we avoid being caught in our left hemispheric bias, we might see Meek’s corrections as offering more freedom to explore and integrate the whole. I don’t hear Meek asking for one or the other ways of knowing but for an epistemology that would integrate holistic, intuitive insights and analytical, rational reasoning, an epistemology that recognizes that different situations call for different approaches to understanding.
In formulating the idea of the left hemisphere prioritization of modernity as stereotypical male or paternal and the right hemisphere as female or maternal, we may miss the plasticity of gender when it comes to intimacy and relatedness. Moreover, our focus, if given over to a left hemisphere bias, may be prone to dismiss the analogy of a father who turns his heart toward his children, embracing instead the cultural image of a father as one who provides and protects. Now in fairness to those who hold a view about the determinism of male hormones, there is evidence of biological factors that shape the paternal caretaking role but also evidence of plasticity and nurturing flexibility.[6] The neuroendocrinology research evidence remains mixed, but this emphasis on paternal investment is in the ancient biblical texts of Malachi and Luke, both linking social and cultural sustainability to the immediacy and presence of the father’s intimacy with their children.
Heart Turning
Our current cultural attempts to dismantle the dominance and abuse of the patriarchy may risk dismissing the positive impact of fathers as we attempt to negate patriarchal abuses.[7] The modern view of fathers and the patriarchy often carries connotations of male dominance, power, and control within society and the family unit. In patriarchal systems, men were typically seen as having inherent authority and privilege over women and children, with limited roles for women outside of traditional domestic and caregiving duties. This is often perceived as a traditional view represented in the biblical texts. However, fathering, as depicted in these texts, emphasizes fathers as caretakers, providers, and moral guides within the family structure. Fathers were seen as sharing responsibility for the nurturing, well-being, and upbringing of their children.
There is a tension between these two frames—the structural and the relational—that should not be ignored or set in immediate opposition, one frame negating the other. Nor am I suggesting that we can simply dust off the patriarchy and reinsert it as an ideology. I am arguing that we must turn it, beyond its negation or simplistic reinstallation. This is an invitation from the Spirit of God to the agency of the human father, more an awakening and relational transformation than a task or duty. This is the invitation that I hear in Meek’s natal gaze and McGilchrist’s hemispheric flexibility. For some of us, there is an emotional response to this, as we have experienced the futility of narcissistic fathers, rageful and controlling, or absent fathers, emotionally unavailable and abandoning. How then do we turn the hearts of the fathers?
The passages in the biblical texts of Malachi 4:6 and Luke 1:17 acknowledge the need to reorient fathers in their approach to engaging with their children.[8] The heart, as a cultural symbol, represents the innermost core of one’s being—the source of thoughts, intentions, and emotions. Thus, my phrase “hearts of the fathers” symbolizes the inner disposition and character of fathers, including their love, devotion, and commitment to their children. The Hebrew word translated as turn is וְהֵשִׁ֣יב (veheshiv), which comes from the root שׁוּב (shuv). This word carries the meaning of to return or to turn back and is often used in the context of repentance.
I confess to not having a definitive answer to what this looks like, but I have one last story to share, one of my own that speaks to the way my development—my sense of self and other—has been transformed by the heart of my own father.
I was a young father in graduate school, meeting with a group of male friends. We gathered annually for three days, rotating between the different cities where each of us resided. This year, it happened to be in my city of Chicago, where my wife, young son, and I lived. On the second day, I shared with my friends how weary and tired I was of school. The combination of coursework and a young family was hard for me, and I wanted to give up. They listened and expressed concern, but one of my friends chided me about getting support. He asked if I had talked to my father about how I felt.
“No,” I said, “I have not.”
He revealed that he had actually talked to my father during a point of distress in his own life and encouraged me to do the same. I was surprised, to say the least—my friend and his father were estranged, yet here he was assertively pushing me to talk with my own father. I felt disoriented and somehow hurt and encouraged at the same time. He was confessing to a relationship he had with my father that I didn’t have. When my father and I talked, it was typically about sports and general topics. I didn’t usually confide in him; that was more likely to occur with my mother, as my father would pass her the phone after a brief greeting. She was my confidante when it came to my emotional life. He had been a bystander in my enmeshment with her.
I returned home that evening, stirred by the meeting and my frustrated desires for sympathy from these men. This was our last meeting as they were all scheduled to travel the next day, but I had a hard time finding closure. The next day, Sunday afternoon, still stirred, I decided to call my father and let him know how I was feeling. I dialed the phone, not sure what I was going to say but tenuously committed to expressing my feelings. He answered the phone. I said, “Hey Dad, I have something I want to tell you.” He responded, “I have something I want to tell you too.”
I was thrown off because this was not our usual way of talking to each other on the phone. Usually, it was the generic “How’s the weather?” hello and “Here’s your mother” script. He wanted to go first, so of course I wondered what he was going to say. “I overheard your conversation with your mother about how you were struggling and having a hard time. I wanted to tell you that I love you, and I’m proud of you.” His words broke something open in me, and I began to cry. I cried so hard that I couldn’t answer back. My three-year-old son came into the room at that moment, and I passed him the phone, managing to say, “Here, talk to Pop-Pop.”
At that moment, my father saw me. It wasn’t that he hadn’t before, but this was the reciprocal moment that I saw that he saw; and in this moment, he expressed delight in me, and that delight grasped me. I believed him, and I returned to him in a way I had never done so before.
[1] See Meek, “The Other: Returning to Our Natal Philosophy in the Mother’s Smile,” The Other Journal 38.5 (2024).
[2] See Meek, “The Other.”
[3] See Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020); Smith, The End of Theological Education (Eerdmans, 2023); and Moltmann-Wendel, I Am My Body: A Theology of Embodiment (Continuum, 1994).
[4] See Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Harvard University Press, 1978).
[5] See McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009).
[6] See Richard G. Bribiescas, “Developing Dads: Exploring the Evolutionary Biology of Human Fathers as Caretakers,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 2024, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/05/biology-of-caretaker-dads.
[7] See bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (Washington Square, 2004).
[8] More recent translations have used the word parent instead of father, but the Hebrew word used for father in Malachi is אָב (pronounced av), which typically refers to the male parent, just like the Greek word πατήρ (pater), which is used in the Luke passage.