What is Longing to Know about?

People considering knowing God can't help but have questions about knowing. Longing to Know addresses these questions by offering a fresh model concerning how people know anything at all.

Knowing is a profoundly human longing, a struggle responsibly to make sense of experience by shaping patterns and then submitting to their reality. Knowing, thus defined, turns out to be woven throughout the fabric of our lives. Ordinary acts of knowing happen pervasively. Knowing God is just such an ordinary act of knowing. As the book repeats in its primary illustration, knowing God is like knowing your auto mechanic.

This message restores hope and confidence, as well as a sense of humility, adventure, and stewardship concerning knowing in general, and knowing God in particular. My hope is that the book will heighten readers' longing to know.

What is Longing to Know like?

I wrote Longing to Know for people who have questions about knowing, truth, certainty and doubt, especially as they are considering Christianity or struggling to live as Christians. Thus the book is a tool for preevangelism, as well as for discipleship.

In writing Longing to Know, I strove to make it popular and accessible, for busy but thoughtful people. No prerequisites are presumed either in philosophy or in Christianity. I want the book to be an aid to the reader's personal quest. Short chapters and discussion questions facilitate the reader's thinking through his or her own beliefs. I suggest in the book that two or more people can share the quest as they read the book together.

Longing to Know should give the reader a fresh and exciting vision of both philosophy and Christianity. It should restore hope and confidence concerning knowing in general, and knowing God in particular.

One of my students has called me a "philosopher mom." I seriously believe, and live and write in light of this, that philosophy is for everybody, and about all of life. So Longing to Know is a book that will appeal to parents of small children as much as it does to college students, to cooks, artists, counselors, gardeners, scientists and teachers. My hope is that Longing to Know unleashes philosophy to be of value to ordinary people, and restores the appeal and value of Christianity to them as well.

Who should read Longing to Know?

I hope everybody reads Longing to Know! But I wrote it, as I say in the Foreword, for three groups of people in particular. First, for people with questions about knowledge, truth, certainty and doubt, spawned by the recent culture shift from modernism to postmodernism. Second, for people who have such questions as a result of moving from adolescence to adulthood (which spans quite a few years nowadays!). Third, for people who have such questions prompted by considering Christianity or reconsidering it. Many of us fall into more than one of these categories.

I targeted people in their 20s, partly because they are so dear to my heart, and partly because I hope that they will represent the average age of a much wider span of people, high schoolers through octogenarians, who will benefit from reading Longing to Know. I also especially had in mind offering a book that university campus ministers would find a valuable tool to use as they care for students.

Longing to Know is a book for anyone intrigued by the overlap of philosophy and theology, and the relationship of faith and reason. I hope classes in high school, college, graduate school and seminary may find Longing to Know a unique introductory text to use to orient students to learning and further study in that institution and in life.

What books currently on the market complement Longing to Know? What makes Longing to Know unique?

I know of no other book that features the same approach or vision for reuniting philosophy and life, art and science, faith and reason, Christianity and epistemology, nor that seeks to blend the epistemological insights of philosopher Michael Polanyi with a reformed, covenant theological approach to Scripture.

However, people who like Longing to Know will also enjoy and find of great value books in my Related Reading List.

People wanting to know more about Michael Polanyi should begin with The Tacit Dimension,  and some of his essays in Marjorie Grene’s collection, Knowing and Being. Do read at least one essay before tackling his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge. Personal Knowledge will especially appeal to scientists, and anyone who loves stories of scientific discovery. Polanyi himself began his professional career as a research scientist who drew the attention of Albert Einstein. His son, John, is a Nobel prize winning chemist. See the recently released definitive biography, Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher, by William Scott and Martin Moleski.

For philosophers, read Marjorie Grene’s masterful analysis of the history of philosophy, The Knower and the Known. Grene has demonstrated the uncanny affinity between Polanyi's work and the thought of continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Other philosophers have written on Michael Polanyi. These include Richard Gelwick, The Way of Discovery; Andy Sanders, Michael Polanyi's Post-Critical Epistemology; Drusilla Scott, Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of Michael Polanyi; Martin Moleski, S.J., Personal Catholicism. Contributions from several others are featured in Tradition and Discovery, the journal of the Polanyi Society.