Esther's top 5 favorite books

2. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge. This is Polanyi's 1950s magnum opus in which he takes on the daunting challenge of dreaming up a fresh epistemology that comports with his personal experience in scientific discovery. Especially if you like stories from science, as I do, this book is intriguing. It is a sustained and thorough documentation and defense of the existence of "the tacit coefficient" of all knowing, which he begs us to "accredit" and hence be more intentional and effective in our use of it. It is also his criticism of the still prevailing misguided epistemological legacy of the Western tradition. Other later essays of his may provide the initiate a quicker entrée to his thought or prep for reading Personal Knowledge. A good one is :"Tacit Knowing," the first lecture in his Tacit Dimension. A young man once lent me a copy of Personal Knowledge, and in reading it I saw the prospects for the kind of dissertation topic I wanted (cross-disciplinary and general in philosophical scope), and I read for the first time the tantalizing oft-repeated phrases--"reality is that which may manifest itself indeterminately in the future" that gave me the hope of contact with reality I longed for.

3. Ralph McInerny's A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists. This is philosophical writing at its best and wisest and funniest and most accessible. Fifi LaRue, a freshman in Professor Popinjoy's philosophy class at Upsilon University, and little Orville whose doting uncle gives him a mouth organ on which Orville learns to play "The Stars and Stripes Forever", introduce the novice to philosophy, to the relative merits of the classical over the modern approach to philosophy, to Aristotle, and to Thomas Aquinas. Again, when I grow up…

4. John MacMurray's Persons in Relation. In the context of a conversation on personhood I had with octogenarian James Houston, he asked me, “Where do you think Polanyi got the “personal” in Personal Knowledge? Even though I had done a dissertation on Polanyi, it had never occurred to me to ask the question. Houston answered my blank surprise: “He got it from John MacMurray.” Finally this past summer I got to read MacMurray’s mid-twentieth-century Gifford lectures, and felt as if I had finally found the book I had been searching for all of my life. To be a person is to be a person-in-relation. Chapter 2 is called, “Mother and Child”—contrary to what is popularly thought, a child from birth is not an animal that needs to be socialized, but rather a person in relation. You gotta love it that this is philosophy! Others working with the idea of being as being in communion are Colin Gunton and John Zizioulas.

5. Down to my fifth--this is hard. I'll skip Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors and Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; Narnia, Harry Potter, Middlemarch, Annie Dillard, Jayber Crow…oh, and the children's books…. Lesslie Newbigin's Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. Reading this book in the late 90s was my “surprised by joy” experience. Newbigin utilizes Polanyi’s work to make his point that our misguided understanding of knowledge in the Western tradition has warped and truncated our understanding of what it is to live as a Christian. He too gets to the point where he drops my favorite phrase about reality (about p. 63). BUT what he did with it sets my heart singing. Why is reality like that, that it issues in tantalizing hints of future prospects? It’s because of God, because the ultimate reality is a Person—something that Polanyi had never said. Just like Lewis with joy, years after my dissertation I finally named what had been tantalizing me in the phrase—and it was God, drawing me to himself! I fell to my knees and wept and worshipped.

6. Oh, sorry: there just has to be another: James Loder's The Transforming Moment. I read this dense, astounding book this fall. Loder elucidates a similar revised epistemology (the transforming moment corresponds to Meek’s “Oh-I-See-It” moment). But then he shows how such events both prefigure and are often coopted by the Holy Spirit to occasion “convictional knowing.” In the end it all points to the Eucharist! I have to go back over this wonderful ground again and again. But what I and my students experienced was that Loder’s book didn’t just describe convictional knowing credibly; it actually prompted it.