Winter 2024
This special issue of The Other Journal is akin to a roundtable response to Esther Meek’s work as the Senior Scholar at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. It features a thoughtful summation of Esther’s work alongside a number of creative responses, each of which are authored by a member of the faculty or staff at the school. Each respondent, having read Esther’s primary essay, has been asked to replyfrom their own field of interest and perspective.
The issue has been gracefully edited by Dr. Paul Hoard, whose creative response you can find below!
We hope you enjoy this thoughtful exchange.
Have you witnessed the moment when a young mother first sees her newborn child? Mother is holding her infant to herself, gazing into their face in rapture, smiling a joyous, self-giving, surprise-filled, welcome. Recently I learned from a seasoned delivery room nurse that a French phrase, “en face,” names the first face-to-face encounter; medicine deems […]
I want to begin by thanking Esther Meek for her reflections on, as she describes it, the encounter of oneself with the other. In her sensitive essay, Meek describes the “primal encounter” between mother and infant that sets the foundation for relationships across the lifetime, including relationships with and to the “other,” and she makes […]
I am grateful for the opportunity to interact with Esther Meek’s thoughts around the significance of the other and the real, all of which are a gift to the school. In her essay, she invites us to consider the importance of the early “face-to-face encounter” between the mother and child, and she highlights the philosophical […]
Oh, how I long for the day as stated in Galatians 3:28-29 (Christian Standard Bible version) when “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[1] Quite often, when there is a conversation or reading about “the other”, my mind […]
Invariably, in the opening weeks of my introductory biblical studies classes, a student will share that they are there because they want to know the “truth” about the Bible and about what “really happened.”[1] It eventually becomes clear they have entered the classroom with two key assumptions: first, that the Bible is a history book […]
Esther Meek in “The Other: Returning to Our Natal Philosophy in the Mother’s Smile” invites us into a relational knowing that is deeply dependent on and indebted to the other. Meek defines this other as “another being—the world, a person or thing—beyond me.”She goes on to explain that “even the mention of the other rightly […]
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 […]
The beauty of what Esther Meek has invited us into through her essay “The Other” is a consideration of the interdependence of knowing. Pointing us to the relationship between a mother and child, she reminds us that we need one another, that ultimately knowing requires a relationship with an other: “Knowing in its natal and […]
Nestled solidly within Esther Meek’s essay “The Other” is a profound dare to followers of the Jesus Way to relocate, maybe even rediscover, faith beyond reason.[1] Meek invites us to open to the real, to receive in the smile of the other an invitation to pivot from ideologies, anonymity, and abstractions and, in a loving […]
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 […]
