Associate Professor of Religion Derek Nelson ’99
Director, Wabash Pastoral Leadership Program
Avocation: woodworking
Favorite style: Arts and Crafts
Makes: tables, chairs, canoe, altar, daughter’s cradle…
Tools: Powermatic 66 table saw, Hitachi C15 mitre saw, Dewalt 13" portable thickness planer, WoodRiver #4 smoothing plane, Veritas A2 spokeshave
My dad was a carpenter, my grandfather was a carpenter—it goes back about seven generations. After my dad fell off a house he was building he couldn’t do construction any more, but we had a whole shop full of good tools.
My first project was for 4H—a toolbox and table I made when I was about 10 or 12, so I’ve been at it awhile. After Wabash I moved so often I had 14 addresses in 13 years, and that’s not conducive to setting up shop. So when we found this place in the country, we had this shop built.
If one is concerned about the natural environment, as I am, there are lots of reasons why you might take care of it, but all of them fail unless you love it.
Modern culture has become so estranged from the natural world. I study the Reformation, and the early church heresy of that era was Pelagianism and the idea salvation could be earned by good works. I think the heresy confronting us today is Gnosticism and the idea that the physical world is an illusion.
This notion is all around us, from Internet pornography to the fact that we don’t know where our food comes from. We don’t think it’s weird to eat strawberries in January.
We can become so detached from the stuff of the world.
The product and process of woodworking is an antidote to that for me.
I don’t just spend two hours in the shop; I think about chairs when I’m sitting in them, how they’re made, do I like them. It’s not just about spending two hours a night in the shop—it permeates my life.
— from an interview with Derek Nelson in his shop in rural Montgomery County.