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Thinking is a dynamic process resulting from practices of integration. Thought encounters in openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation confer upon us intellectual work that is uniquely our own. Digital patterns, however, distract us from these creative encounters. Our intellectual searching is weakened and fragmented by frenetic consumption of information. We miss out on reason's innate pull toward integration and concrete reality. This book is an invitation to enter into openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation with deeper understanding and intentionality. We can do this by considering exemplars, persons who lived out the integrity of their hard-won beliefs. Each process of integration is applied also, so that practical knowledge and practice become a way into this intellectual restoration. We need deeper knowledge won in the slow orbit of encounters. Encounters in thought are precisely what each generation needs to apprehend the cosmos, nature, authority, truth, and moral action. Responsibility to this ecologic age requires a reform of reason; this book is just one attempt to convey a way toward this restoration.
Aaron K. Kerr is associate professor of philosophy at Gannon University and chair of the philosophy department. He teaches environmental ethics and has published in the areas of the philosophy of meaning in music, the sacred, the ethics of technology, and the contemplative life.
“In Encounters in Thought: Beyond Instrumental Reason, Aaron K. Kerr interrogates the effects of contemporary technological culture on how humans think. Stating that we have settled into a pattern of ‘thinking more and more about less and less,’ Kerr asks us to rinse our mind with genuine practices of openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation. Kerr provides a rigorous philosophical meditation on the significance of water to human life and an example of contemplative inquiry praxis.”
—Annette M. Holba, Plymouth State University
“We live in a time that’s alluring with its promises and uncertain with its prospects. We find ourselves floating in its currents. Aaron Kerr gently pulls us to firm ground, letting us see where the firm ground is flourishing and that there is a tradition of people who disclose to us the splendor of the simple. At the same time, Kerr’s book is clearly structured and eminently teachable.”
—Albert Borgmann, author of Real American Ethics
“In this wise, wide-ranging book, drawing on models as disparate as Anselm of Canterbury and Malcolm X, Aaron Kerr encourages us to move beyond the passivity of digital distractions and the narrowness of pragmatic, often exploitative technologism to develop a ‘synergy of mind and heart,’ to recover essential qualities of openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation that lead both to authentic personal integration and to creative engagement with the critical problems of our time. The invitation to accompany him on these challenging, exhilarating explorations is an opportunity not to be missed!”
—Patrick F. O’Connell, editor, The Merton Seasonal
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