Fire and Knowledge

Part of the The Reading Interviews series.

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I am single and I studied electrical engineering in college and grad school. I’m now working as a design/test engineer in the communications industry. I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church of North America and am still a member. When I’m not working, I enjoy running, golf, playing soccer, watching movies and listening to music. Oh yeah, and reading.

What are your favorite books? What do you like about them and how have they influenced you?

Well, I could probably make an incredibly long list but I’ll pick a few. I know I’ll forget some.

• Creation Regained by Al Wolters - This is probably the first book that introduced me to the idea of a Christian worldview and I still consider it to be one of the best books on the subject. Especially helpful were the concepts of "structure" and "direction" and how they can help Christians avoid seeing part of God’s good creation as evil.
• Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Soren Kierkegaard - The first half of the book reads like a series of short devotionals and the second half of the book is like a collection of proverbs. I’ve probably read it once a year since I’ve gotten it. Besides, every Calvinist could use a good dose of Kierkegaard.
• Any Calvin and Hobbes book - What can I say, they are hilarious. I’m not sure how much they’ve influenced me, other than helping to remind me not to take stuff so seriously.
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - I re-read this book about 6 months ago and I realized that I had forgotten how much I liked it. I first read the book when I was still an engineering student and at the time it made me very exited about engineering. I think it in many ways captures what Sam Florman calls the "existential pleasures" of engineering.

Who are your favorite writers? Explain.

Paul Feyerabend is probably one of my favorite writers. Unfortunately, he writes in a subject area that not a lot of people are interested in (philosophy of science). He has a contrarian spirit which is as amusing as often as it is enlightening. Roy Clouser is also a favorite author of mine. I would probably list both of his books – The Myth of Religious Neutrality and Knowing with the Heart – as two of my favorites. Other authors I enjoy reading, in no particular order, are Neil Postman, Albert Borgmann, Del Ratzsch, and Steve Talbott.

What is the best non-fiction and fiction book you have read recently? Explain.

Non-fiction: Suspicion and Faith by Merold Westphal - This book has had a huge effect on how I think about some aspects of my life, even though I’m still processing the book in some ways. It is about what Christians can learn from atheists like Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. The main theme of the book is that religion is affected by the fall as much as anything else. It is essentially a call for Christians to be honest with themselves - to look at what our true motives are for our actions and beliefs, and to own up to those motives and change them, if necessary.

Fiction: I’ve recently re-read the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve always enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories. Besides the Munch Bunch books and the Choose your Own Adventure books, some of my earliest memories of reading were Sherlock Holmes stories.

Why do you think reading is important? What has led you to make it a priority in your life?

I feel like any way that I answer this question will sound cliche, but reading can open you up to people, places, and ideas that you’ve never heard of, seen, or thought of before. In many ways, I need to make reading a priority because its one of the ways that I learn best. I remember in school other people could go to class without reading the textbooks. I could never do that – I learn way more from reading a text than listening to a lecture.

Are there any other books you would like to recommend?

I usually don’t like to give general book recommendations. It’s not that I don’t think there aren’t great books out there that everybody should read – it’s just that books can be very personal. Some books I would recommend to Christians that I wouldn’t recommend to non-Christians. Some books I would recommend to engineers that I wouldn’t recommend to non-engineers.

Usually when I recommend a book it occurs when I’m talking to somebody and I blurt out "Oooh, you should read such and such by so and so!"

How many books do you normally read at a time?

I usually read one book at a time. Usually when I try to start more than one at a time, I’ll find one of the books more enjoyable than the other and I’ll end up reading that one all the way through before I finish the other. I tend to read a lot of articles and papers on the Internet, too, so those keep me busy while I’m reading books in a linear fashion.

Do you mark and take notes while you read? If so, how?

Usually not. If I do, it’s never in the books themselves, it’s always on a separate sheet of paper or on the computer. I can’t stand highlighting and notes in the margins. I think it’s just a matter of me not liking the idea of my past self thinking he knows what’s important for my present self (if anything, I’d want it the other way around!). I have highlighted before and upon re-reading the book, I’ll have no idea why I highlighted it other than that at one time I must have thought it was important.

Macht blogs at Prosthesis.

The man sitting in the iron [tractor] seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dusk mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat… The driver could not control it–straight across the country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron petals…. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land.

–John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), 35

The standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and communities. We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 12

A man’s character, as a rule, may be known from the place where he lives.

–Kenko (c. 1283-1350), “Essays in Idleness” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 32

Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.

–Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 67

I walk often through places unknown by any name or fact or event to people who live almost within calling distance of them, yet more worthy of their interest, I think, than the distant places to which they devote so much of their attention.

–Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 48