Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology

For the thoughtful inquirer, a full-fledged account of Meek’s philosophy of knowledge.
​Well suited to a semester study and practice.

Excerpt

This book presents the case for covenant epistemology and its healing vision of life. Covenant epistemology is an innovative, biblically compatible, holistic, embodied, life-shaping epistemological vision in which all knowing takes the shape of the interpersonal, covenantally shaped, relationship. Knowing is less about information and more about transformation; less about comprehension and more about being apprehended. Rather than knowing in order to love, we love in order to know. I want to show that all knowing is like knowing God—a transformative encounter.
 
Covenant epistemology creatively blends insights from Michael Polanyi’s philosophically revolutionary epistemological proposals, the motif of covenant as historically unfolding interpersonal relationship (theologian Michael D. Williams), and an important exploration of “interpersonhood,” (John Macmurray, Martin Buber, and James Loder and others). Covenant epistemology rings true to the urgent calls for an interpersonally relational epistemology of missiologist Lesslie Newbigin and educator Parker Palmer, as well as to the Christian Scripture.
 
Loving to Know offers critically needed “epistemological therapy” in response to the pervasive, skewed, damaging, presumptions that people, churches, and institutions in Western culture continue to bring to efforts to know, formal or informal, religious or professional. It replaces modernity’s defective idea of knowledge as information with the recognition that our knowing is an unfolding interpersonal relationship between the knower and the yet-to-be-known.
 
The book’s innovative approach—an unfolding journey and conversation together—itself subverts standard epistemological presumptions of timeless linearity. While it offers a sustained and sophisticated philosophical argument, Loving to Know’s “texts and textures” interweave loosely to effect therapeutic epistemic transformation in the reader.

Order your copy:
From my publisher: Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock
From my hometown bookstore! Bookmarx Books
United States and other countries: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play
Germany: Bol.de, Thalia

Praise for ​Loving to Know

"This is epistemology presented with both eloquence and passion, addressed to the person ‘on the street’ but at the same raising issues that professional philosophers should take account of."

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor emeritus of Philosophical Theology
​Yale University

“This is clearly the work of a masterful, compassionate teacher inviting a wide audience to reflect on the nature of knowledge. Here is epistemology for the people. Through a rich set of conversation partners, Meek puts her own stamp on a Reformed epistemology that makes love and covenant central to our account of knowing. An excellent achievement."

James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy
​Calvin College

"Esther Meek offers a unique vision of a covenant epistemology, a way of knowing that is deeply personal and responsible, because it is profoundly relational. A book for every one of us, as we take up the most perennial of human questions.”

Steven Garber, Director
​The Washington Institute

"Dancing through Esther Meek's Loving to Know is what we all need to do, right now. Take courage to hope again, that there really is a there there after all, and that you can move ahead in knowing it, since you already do! Yes, you are known too. Against the complexities of philosophical jargon, Meek displays hope for living in the real world, and challenges you to flourish in that confidence. Loving to Know is one of the best books I have ever read. It brings bright light into many dark places."

D. Clair Davis, Professor emeritus of Church History
Westminster Theological Seminary, Redeemer Seminary

“This book is a tour de force of clarity, depth, and compelling wisdom. It is an epistemologically therapeutic embrace of how to live well in the world of divergent thought that nevertheless longs to reveal Jesus as the center of all true wisdom. A breathtaking and beautiful labor.”

Dan B. Allender, Professor of Counseling Psychology and Founding President
​The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology