Doorway to Artistry: Attuning Your Philosophy to Enhance Your Creativity

by Esther Lightcap Meek, Makoto Fujimura (Foreword), Martyn Smith (Illustrator)

Your artistry involves you intimately with the world around and beyond you. So your artistry involves profound but simple philosophical matters. As a human person, you are artful and philosophical, at the core of your being. Doorway to Artistry offers a playful, everyday philosophical approach necessary for life, integration, healing, and thriving in artistry. It reflects on the real and how we are involved with it, especially in our creative effort. In short, the real hospitably welcomes us, and in our artistry we reciprocate in noble courtesy. Human persons were made for this communion with the real. Find in this book a hospitable welcome to belong at home beyond where you are.

Genres: Art, Philosophy

248 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2023

About the author

Esther Lightcap Meek (BA, Cedarville College; MA, Western Kentucky University; PhD, Temple University) is Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Geneva College. She is a Makoto Fujimura Institute Scholar, a member of The Polanyi Society, and an Associate Fellow with the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology.

Esther is the author of four books and several publications which express philosophical insights in every-day language for all of us. She also gives courses, workshops and talks for high schools, colleges and graduate institutions, as well as for businesses, churches, and other organizations.

Reviews

[Matt Allhands]

This book is much more dense than you might think at first glance - but the guiding metaphor is very clear. I suggest skimming each chapter's intro to get a functional outline before diving into it in depth.

[Erika]

"Let us allow the glimmering ends we desire constitute our beginnings and ventures."

Sometimes my head swims with the grand philosophical words and ideas, but Esther continually re-grounds us (and I really mean us, I feel that I was on a months-long journey with her) by allowing the ideas to dwell in the lived spaces of her home, 1124. it's a really fun set up and truly a welcome into her life, her home, her ideas, the real that beckons.

[Samuel Springs]

Praise God for Esther Meek and her writing. This book rings out with warmth and beauty. Appraise every sentence by the scripture, yet delight in the wonderful light revealed in it!

With her help I came to have stronger confidence that my embodied knowledge of reality was just that, true contact with the real. In this book, I have come to believe that the real is beautiful and good and true, and that these transcendentals ultimately point to a God who is the author and sustainer and finisher of these. We can know this God, and we can know reality.

I pray that all who are united to Christ would enter into this Christian vision of the real.

EDIT: Re-read in July-August of this year. I have done some study on classical theism and have been introduced to some of the ontology of the church fathers, medieval scholastics, and reformed scholastics. This made me far more receptive of the appeals to classical Christian metaphysics via Schindler and Balthasaar.

I am no expert on any of this, but the integration of Thomistic thought as discussed in Schindler with Polanyism makes for a thoroughly exciting approach to reality. There are so many issues for which I think this stuff could be applied to solve: Disembodiment, disenchantment, and the dissolution of the self and our knowledge of the real.

I retain permission to be critical of the Enneagram, which she references once or twice. But generally, this is really just an awesome book!

[Aimee Byrd]

Meek's provoking and inviting philosophy is matched by her joy and passion for life and people.