I have long held the conviction that Western thought was formatively birthed in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Recently, while preparing to teach my Postmodern Philosophers class, I found my conviction grimly underscored.

You may have read the Republic, in which the Allegory appears. Prisoners are chained facing the back wall of a cave. Along a parapet behind them, people walk back and forth, carrying objects. A fire built behind the people on the parapet casts their shadows on the wall the prisoners face. What the prisoners see is really only shadows. The prisoners of the Allegory reflect Plato’s estimate of the sophistry-loving citizens of Athens.

A teacher releases a prisoner from his chains and compels him to turn away from the shadows and start a difficult ascent towards the light. The first stage upward brings the prisoner-turned-student to behold the ever-changing world that we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Nothing permanent here, but a definite step-up from subjectivistic delusions. The motifs of conversion and ascent towards light have for millennia powered and intertwined the West’s conceptions of learning and salvation.Read more

I thought it was just a flaw of mine that I easily get ecstatic about things. The light of the sky on the water; trains with 5 engines, people, marching bands… When I was young, my staid mother indicated that when I was excited like that I was out of control; I grew up tacitly supplying the premise that being out of control is a bad thing.

Take crossing the Ohio River, for instance. They may find me, someday,  like one of those flying witch decorations at Halloween, plastered on the girders of the bridge I cross to and from work: I’m always cranking my neck to gawk at how the water looks under the sky. One evening at dusk I was crossing just east of my favorite railroad bridge—a massive iron structure gracefully lifting its iron lace in twin peaks skyward. The vibrant pink and blue of the cloud-tempered west, behind that black bridge, found an equally radiant pastel twin mirrored on very still water underneath. But emerging from under the bridge and almost below me was an immense barge of coal, maneuvered by a “push” (a better term than “tug,” I feel, since they’re not tugging, after all). The barge’s humorlessly squared prow was steadily thrusting its matte-blackness into the glowing watery mirror. And the wake emerging from the sides of the prow spread wings of trembling black stripes in the pink and blue stillness! Such a sight!

“Observing” is hardly apt as a description of what I am doing at such a moment; “eating” is more like it. Or “taking a bath.” I am immersed in color, and dancing in it as one would stamp in puddles or shower in a tropical waterfall. Read more

[Editor's Note: Dr. Esther Meek taught at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, and now she is a professor of philosophy at Geneva College. She is the author of Longing to Know.]
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I have been thinking about the word, “true.” 

It’s a concept that matters deeply, and it is one that philosophers have struggled with little success and much frustration to define. My own work in the theory of knowledge to offer a positive alternative to modernism and postmodernism implicates me, obviously, in the matter of truth. But I have been dancing around the concept, so to speak, and not exactly giving it focused attention. So this post is a preliminary foray into the question of what “true” is. 

Theologian John Frame taught me to see things in threes—the embodied knowing person, the known world, and the norming words. So I start my inquiry regarding truth by identifying three dimensions. Truth, first, always involves my affirmation, my “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” Like a hammer that really isn’t what it was meant to be until it is wielded by a hammerer, truth always is truth in action—someone claiming it. It takes an active personal involvement, or it’s not even truth. It’s your congregation reciting the Apostles’ Creed, or your math professor asserting and employing theorems and strategies.Read more

Suppose that you were orphaned as a baby, and then, say, at the age of 10, were adopted into another family. The people who adopted you were now your new parents, your only parents; their children your siblings, their extended family yours, their ancestry yours. This new arrangement spells your deliverance from the hardship and abandonment you’ve experienced until now, bringing you into a gloriously freeing and loving home.

Even as this delightful adoption comes about, you would be learning and locating yourself in your new family’s old story. You might pull the family record of genealogies off the shelf and study it, adding your own name to the empty lines near the bottom. You might sit enclosed gently in the arms of your new father as he tells you his story, joining your new brothers and sisters in hearing tales of what are now your great aunts and uncles, getting a deepening sense of the way your new family views the world and its place in it.

It would be your growing delight to come to own that this is MY father, MY people, MY story. This is who I am and where I belong. Imagine the sense of identity and significance that would be yours as a result, and the sense of purpose as you enlist body and soul in the family’s mission in life.  [1] Recently an adoptive father told me that the adoption must occur in both directions: while he had adopted his son, his son had to come to the place where he adopted him as his father.Read more

My family is a part of a community of friends who have all taken up residence in the Read more

I had to preach about Palm Sunday this past Sunday. At first I felt a little uninspired; all I could think about was children wildly waving palm branches and singing happy songs, like we did when we were kids.

Then I started to read, I mean really read, the stories about Palm Sunday all over again. Take Luke 19:28-44. Here's Jesus, riding a colt down the road to Jerusalem. At first it sort of looks like our childhood re-enactments: people singing, palm branches waving, a spirit of happinness and expectation. But then something totally unexpected happens that we never seemed to include in the Sunday school lessons. Jesus begins to weep.Read more

It is good to have a collection of heroes. One of mine is the British missionary Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), who after serving as a missionary in India for many years returned to Britain, only to find that he needed to be a missionary there as well. Newbigin was convinced that the most effective way a secular, pluralistic culture can be reached with the gospel is through the local congregation. "The only hermenuetic of the gospel,” he wrote, “is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it." He means that the local church, like the one you are a part of, should be "interpreting" the gospel and its significance for the world.Read more

Our American cities are currently undergoing a great sea-change. Historically and globally, cities have concentrated their wealth, power and culture in the centers of cities, while the poor and disenfranchised orbit the centers on the periphery.Read more

A Read more

Recently I watched the movie Crash.Read more