Many thanks to you all at TSS for your hospitable welcome in this post as Senior Scholar and in this symposium. Together we are inviting the coming of the real in a profounder understanding of and intimacy with it. To this end I offer this small summative piece of brief comments and adjustments.

Philosophy in Felt Pictures

Thanks for helping me to see that, yes, philosophizing does deal in stylized, simplified motifs, guiding picture maxims, as it endeavors to trace the philosophical lineation of human existence: what reality is and how we know it.

Other philosophers have offered such a picture. Plato offered the era-forming allegory of the cave. Descartes’ thought experiment to uncover the absolute, disembodied, oppositional self as knower set the vision of modernity. I’m offering a stylized picture too, one which might be said to be Hebraic in origin.[1]

I also maintain that philosophy isn’t abstract but concretely felt and everyday ordinary. At least the philosophy I’m interested is what we all wear in the streets. In my philosophical therapy, as I call it, I look at what we’re all doing when we know and re-lay the accents to help people pick out, not the defective modernist epistemological pattern, but a more deeply human default which the modernist paradigm eclipses. I help people see that in their best knowings they are already enacting it.

Distinguishing Philosophy and Psychology

I’m interested in those philosophical lineaments as they occur everywhere. In any particular field such as psychology or theology, it can be hard to distinguish what is philosophy and what is psychology or theology.[2] I’ve made matters complex by tapping philosophically typically deemed psychological matters: the mother’s gaze. I hope it helps to say that I’m interested in the knowing in emotional health, and the emotional health in knowing!

Proposing an Apt Picture of Reality and Knowing

The philosophical picture I propose is an event of hospitable welcome. The real, the other, is the host. Reality’s defining signature: it arrives, shows up, hospitably welcoming us to belong at home in the new world it opens. This hospitality isn’t passive and laid back! Rather, it is epiphanic, surprising, a dramatic reversal of the way of our world. D.C. Schindler’s characterization of knowing as nonpossessive and ecstatic reflects this lively signature of reality. Reality itself is a eucontaminant—Paul Hoard’s term. Our best knowings are communion of friendship with the real. I loved the reminder from Henri Nouwen that hospitality is a sort of present absence: the host creates a welcoming space–a home which we may enter to belong.

I put forth that we can see these philosophical lines at the point of their origin from our birth literally into our mother’s hospitable welcome. The event of Mother’s welcome is not just an example; it is philosophically formative. But there are other examples, as you recognize: the hospitable table, a parking lot encounter, a grown-up child’s encounter with Dad. And mission, of course! I loved the Newbigin quote, and the suggestion of the epistemic value of the Gentile mission.

Who is the Other

The other I have in mind is reality—a reality that is there beyond me. Its defining signature: it arrives, shows up, hospitably welcoming me to belong at home in the world it brings. My point about the other is to call us to dissent from the rude egocentrism of the modernist paradigm and reinstate the other (reality), in our philosophical picture, in the primacy and regard the other is due.

The other is not limited to people and people groups considered other, though these are instances and exemplary.  The other includes the Ohio River and orchids and china dishes and omelettes and highway drainage systems and tools and business startups and scientific discoveries and symposiums.

Continuing to ponder the disciplinary distinctions: In psychology, the real which comes in welcome is emotional health for individuals and cultural health for groups of people.[3] In theology, it’s G-d: the “–” suggests non-possessive, ecstatic invitation of dramatic reversal. In philosophy, it’s a picture or account that makes so much sense that we recognize that reality shows up.

Remember SFI

Thanks to Ron Ruthruff and Joel Kiekintveld for recalling the Polanyian epistemology I have workshopped with you on earlier occasions. “All knowing involves focal awareness responsibly achieved through integration from clues of which we are subsidiarily aware.” Here’s how my current essay presumes SFI: that aha! moment of integrative insight is the showing up of the real, which in dramatic reversal retroactively transforms the hitherto meaningless pieces-turned-clues-turned subsidiaries as they settle in as lovely lively parts of a lovely lively whole. In knowing, that integrative whole has primacy: it sets the hospitable table. The process toward insight isn’t linear but rather a messy scrabbling among clues toward a half hidden vision which breaks in from beyond.

Thanks to Derek McNeil for underscoring integration; even left and right brain and neuron firings must be rendered subsidiary parts to the integrative whole which is understanding. Thanks to Paul Hoard for identifying SFI in the maturing of the mother-child encounter itself. Also, he is right to aver that inviting a half-understood reality can be threatening and painful in advance of it, peaceable only in retrospect once it has come.

Knowing as from (subsidiary) to (focal) integration makes the critical point, so important to liberating us from the stranglehold of modernist epistemology: No knowledge is wholly focal. The integrated articulable focal pattern is rooted in a distinct subsidiary layer you indwell inarticulably to attend from. Insight, the focal pattern, arrives only as we shift from looking at to anticipatively indwelling and looking from the particulars. Modernity mistakenly presumes that knowledge is only focal. This is ironic, for focal knowledge actually cuts us off from the real. It is myopic. C.S. Lewis’s memorable example is the dwarves, so worried about being taken in that they refuse to be taken out, as Aslan remarks.

Within the lively primacy of the whole, the parts, as subsidiary, are set free to be themselves, interacting in a lighthanded artistry. Thank you, Monique Gadsden, for your important emphasis on noticing regard for the real needing to therein to honor the flesh by being through the flesh—and culture. This exemplifies the healthy relatedness of parts and whole which SFI provides. Monique, your cry of exhaustion as an othered other cuts to the heart. It expresses so well the muted suffering of a reality that is spurned or reduced to its pieces or possessed only for its uses. Modernist epistemology perpetrates such exhaustion. See also Robin Wall Kimmerer’s powerful lament for an exhausted land.[4]

Complexifying my Picture of Mother

I see reality’s signature hospitable welcome in Mother and tiny child I-Thou encounter. My sense of my own unremembered natal encounter with my mother, I admit, has grown rosier in retrospect, as I draw primarily on my 50-some years as a mother and 10 as a grandmama. Also, it has matured, over my 70+ years as a child, in the retroactively healing noticing regard of certain friends and therapists. It actually matures with every coming of the real in hospitable welcome. In other work, I have attributed this philosophical formation to mothers and friends.[5] As Balthasar remarks: “The promise of the mother’s smile is only fulfilled in Christianity.”

Thanks to O’Donnell Day who expressed concern that my picture of the mother’s welcome is not present at the outset of life. As per my thinking above, a healthy version of maternal welcome forms integratively over time. Yes, my mothering continues to be fraught with brokenness, mine and my children’s. But this very brokenness and any efforts to repair it presuppose the prior promise in the mother’s holding and beholding.

If you are going to offer a paradigm, it should be a positive one. Similarly, in Loving to Know, I insisted that the interpersoned relationship which paradigms knowing is a healthy, differentiated, perichoretic one.[6] But this is then a philosophical account in which knowing can be seen to suffer or be enhanced by emotional ill-health or health—and vice versa.

Mother and Modernity

I eventually realized that I’d garbled my likening modernist epistemology to a defective mother-child scenario. In disavowing reality, modernist epistemology corresponds, not to the mother’s rejection of the child, but to the older child’s suspicion/disavowal of the mother. This is perhaps more the immature move of adolescence, as it appears to have been in my own life; tellingly, it coincides with western academic training. Only in writing my 2023 book, Doorway to Artistry did I realize that my skepticism was “adolescent-onset.”I began then to advocate returning to “a metaphysics of childhood.” G.K. Chesterton argued similarly against modernism, commending instead a return to the philosophy natural to a tiny child. Balthasar represents maturing in epistemology as needing to get over and grow up out of adolescent skepticism.[7]

Thanks for affirming the ravages of modernist epistemology, and for relating how you enact the philosophical paradigm of hospitable welcome to subvert it: Dwight Friesen, in teaching and church. Ron Ruthruff and Joel Kiekintveld, in church. Kelsey Wallace, in philosophically telltale care and ministry with respect to the wreckage of modernity’s endemically colonizing epistemology. Jermaine Ma, in honoring our own and others’ narratives, glorying in the subsidiary particularities, healing the wounds.

In our efforts to address modernist epistemology, I offer this guidance: in addressing modernity’s wreckage, be careful not to concede its epistemological playing field. For modernist epistemology, there is only ankelose focal information, concepts preemptively dismissive of a lively reality which catches us up in its coming, which honors subsidiaries limbered up to dance. This just is modernity’s colonizing.

Decolonizing colonizing epistemology must be done epistemologically—not by tacitly conceding the defining rules of its epistemological game but by changing the game.  What I am offering is a philosophical vision that does this: Here is what knowing actually looks like. You’re already doing it when you garden or counsel or play jazz. Knowing isn’t arming but rather disarming. We attend best to the care and healing of the modernist paradigm’s colonizing ravages by living from the more fundamentally human one of the hospitable welcome by the other.   Concretely, how might one redraw the philosophical lines? Welcome someone other into your home. And accord mothers and others the philosophical gravitas they are due.

[1] Dru Johson, Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021);Esther Lightcap Meek, “Proposing a Seventh Philosophical Style: ‘Interpersonalist’: Response to Dru Johnson’s Biblical Philosophy” (Philosophia Christi, forthcoming).

[2] See D. C. Schindler’s helpful discussion in “Philosophy and Theology,” chap. 10 in Catholicity of Reason (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).

[3] I have my own story of emotional healing as discovery, as an instance of reality walking in. In a period of trauma I was desperately seeking a proper diagnosis of my plight. Late one night reading online, I came across a term I had not known. As I read about it, in an hour, I was breathing more deeply! This conforms to psychiatrist Eugene Gendlin’s account of active listening and the felt body shift, in Focusing (New York: Bantam, 1979).

[4] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

[5] Esther Lightcap Meek, Being Seen: Philosophical Formation in the Welcoming Smile of Mothers and Friends (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2025, forthcoming).

[6] Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), esp. chap. 11.

[7] Mandy Smith, Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture (foreword by Walter Brueggeman; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2021). Smith coins the term, “adulting,” for modernist epistemology.