I’ve long been a fan of Eugene H. Peterson. Most people know him as “The Message guy”, for better or worse, but for decades he’s been writing rich, stirring books on what he calls “spiritual theology.” A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, a book on Christian discipleship with a title re-appropriated from Nietzsche, of all people, is one worth reading again and again. That’s just one of some 30 books he’s written. But it was his work as a pastor in suburban Baltimore for nearly 30 years that has defined his life vocationally. That’s the subject of his new book, The Pastor: A Memoir. It’s a wonderful book for anyone who is a pastor, has a pastor, or has opinions about pastors. That’s most of us.
Peterson’s writing is what endeared him to me in the first place, but I must admit there was an added element of intrigue when I discovered that Eugene H. Peterson’s middle name is Hoiland. Then I learned that he was born in Stanwood, a small town in Washington state where my grandfather Theol Hoiland served as a pastor and where my dad lived for a bit as a kid. Peterson’s new memoir fills in some more blanks in our shared family tree. Though Peterson’s father was Swedish, his mother was Norwegian, and her maiden name was Hoiland. Her parents, Eugene’s maternal grandparents, arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, coming from Stavanger, the part of Norway where my ancestors also originated. The Hoilands of Stavanger: Eugene’s ancestors and mine.
So what specifically does Peterson have to say about these Hoilands? Well, he refers to two of them in detail: his grandfather Andre and his uncle Sven. Andre came to the US by himself in 1900 to work in a steel mill in Pittsburgh, before returning to get his wife and nine kids and bring them to settle in Montana, where he worked making sidewalks. Legend has it that when the Hoilands settled in Montana, they brought along a Norwegian troll named Skogen, which is a bit odd. But not as strange as the story of Sven, one of Andre’s sons and Eugene’s mother’s favorite older brother. Sven, as it happens, was shot and killed by his wife after he beat her and told her to solicit herself. He had been a drunkard, an adulterer and a thief, and had been married a mere six weeks.
Peterson heard these stories -- good ones from his mother, bad ones from everyone else -- and wondered what to make of it all. But as he reflected back on those stories, he realized that the contradictory legacy of Uncle Sven helped form him as the pastor he would eventually become:
The contradictions in Sven, the affectionate and playful big brother set alongside the abusive and violent husband, worked themselves into my adolescent imagination. Did one cancel the other? Was there any way to get the playful brother and the abusive husband into the same story?
He set out to write a novel based on the complex character of Sven, though it never amounted to much:
But the effort to accommodate the ambiguities of the moral and spiritual life did. I had no idea as I was plotting this novel that I was developing a pastoral imagination adequate for entering into the complexities of good and evil, sin and salvation, that make up much of the daily life of a congregation. When I finally did become a pastor, I was surprised at how thoroughly Sven had inoculated me against “one answer” systems of spiritual care: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong” is the warning posted by H.L. Mencken.
Thanks to Sven, I was being prepared to understand a congregation as a gathering of people that requires a context as large as the Bible itself if we are to deal with the ambiguities of life in the actual circumstances in which people live them. If the life of David that comprised prayer and adultery and murder could be written and told as a gospel story, no one in my congregation would be written off. For me, my congregation would become a work-in-progress -- a novel in which everyone and everything is connected in a salvation story in which Jesus has the last word. No reductions to stereotype: not my grandmother’s desperate reduction of her son to a death-bed repentance, not my mother’s affectionate reduction of her brother to a fun-loving, devil-may-care naif, not the jury’s legal reduction of Sven to a drunken wife abuser, not the detached reduction by a psychiatrist of Sven to a narcissistic sociopath.
I’m proud to be related to Eugene Hoiland Peterson. I’m not proud to be related to Sven. But like it or not, I’m related to both. All of us are, one way or another.
Last week’s Repaso was a day late and a little on the light side, but I think I’ve made up for it here. This week, a dizzying array of cool stuff. Ten items, in fact. Please enjoy, and comment with any thoughts.
1. Remembering Rich Mullins
Veteran Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson has a reflection for The Rabbit Room about the late great Rich Mullins, who passed away 14 years ago this week. Rich’s record A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Raggamuffin Band is in my all-time top five albums. It is sheer magic.
We rounded the bend at sunset and there before us stood those craggy Tetons, all gray stone with white snow tucked into the fissures. The clouds were gold with sunlight and long, misty fingers of rain dangled from them, caressing the peaks and the aspen- and fir-covered shoulders of the range. Who else but Rich Mullins could write music that would adequately suit a scene like that? I demanded the iPod, selected A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band, and we drove the next forty-five minutes without speaking. We weren’t speaking because we were being spoken to.
2. Eugene Peterson interview in Leadership Journal Katie is reading Eugene Peterson’s new memoir The Pastor, and I’m getting more and more excited to read it too with each little excerpt she reads to me. In this interview I was reminded of so many of the reasons I love Peterson. For example, this:
My task as pastor was to show how the Bible got lived. Of course it's important to show that the Bible is true, but we have theologians and apologists for that. I just accepted the fact it was true and didn't bother much about that. I needed to be a witness to people in my congregation that everything in the Bible is livable and to try to avoid abstractions about big truths, big doctrines. I wanted to know how these ideas got lived in the immediate circumstances of people's lives at work, in the town, and in the family. The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract. And so that's why, for me, a small congregation was so essential. It enabled me to know the people I was preaching to, teaching, and praying with.
3. FoxNews visits Lancaster
If we needed any “fair and balanced” convincing that Lancaster really is a hip destination (if Lady Gaga's visit didn't do it for you), here you go! My roommate’s mom even gets a shout-out for good measure.
It's a Saturday afternoon in the Prince Street Cafe, a coffee-and-sandwich spot in Lancaster, Pa. A couple in their 20s canoodle on a plush leather couch by the fireplace. A 30-something in thick, black-framed glasses punches away on a laptop between bites of a green salad topped with quinoa, and a college-age girl with a brunette pixie doodles in her sketchpad. It comes as a bit of a surprise, then, when you wander upstairs to artist Julia Swartz's gallery and find a series of portraits depicting local Amish men-straw hats, serious-looking black suits, and all. Here at the Prince Street Cafe, it's easy to forget you're in Amish Country.
A plastic school might sound like it's better suited for Barbies than for people, but the technology—developed by the Guatemalan nonprofit Pura Vida—is actually quite clever and allows for schools to be built for less than $10,000. The plastic bottles are stuffed with trash, tucked between supportive chicken wire, and coated in layers of concrete to form walls between the framing. The bottles make up the insulation, while more structurally sound materials like wood posts are used for the framing.
If, as Jews, we replace the old caricature of hayseed fundamentalist mobs carrying torches and pitchforks with one of dark conspirators trying to worm their way back into political power at the highest levels, we run the risk of accusing them of doing to others what we are doing to them: demonizing. We didn't like it when people said we had horns and tails, ate the blood of Christian children and poisoned the wells of Europe with plague, much less conspired to rule the world through our Protocols. “Evangelicals in the main want the same kind of common-sense solutions and moral integrity as other Americans,” [Rev. Joel] Hunter says. “We do not want to use political means for our faith's advancement; we just want to vote our values and leave it at that.”
6. Entrepreneurs more likely to pray
A few of my friends working at the intersections of business and faith tweeted or shared this story. Interesting findings:
Entrepreneurs behave just like most Americans when it comes to religion — but with one spiritual twist. They're significantly more likely to pray several times a day or to meditate, says sociologist Kevin Dougherty, a co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey. The survey can't answer whether prayerful, peaceful folks are more likely to take a business risk or whether the stress of a start-up drives folks to their knees or to the lotus position, Dougherty says.
7. Nicaragua and the Ortega family
One of my favorite places to go for news and commentary on Latin America is the Central American Politics Blog by Mike, a professor at the University of Scranton right here in Pennsylvania. He shared this video from Univision about how Daniel Ortega’s family and the Sandinista party have taken control of the Nicaraguan media, and by extension, have ensured they will be in control after November’s elections and for the foreseeable future.
8. Social networks in Latin America
Stephanie Garlow, who runs GlobalPost’s Latin America blog, has some interesting info on social media popularity in the region:
There's a whole wide world of social networks out there, and Latin America isn't missing out on the party.
More than 95 percent of internet users in Latin America now use social networks, up 16 percent from a year ago, according to a study by internet analysts comScore.
9. Jewish support for immigration reform
M. Daniel Carroll R., a Guatemalan-American professor of Old Testament at Denver Seminary and author of the important book Christians at the Border, has a blog post on the increasing participation of the Jewish community in working for immigration reform and their reasons for involvement:
As I have spoken to these Jews about their reasons for joining the “cause,” two primary reasons have been given me. One is that their own history for many centuries as a people has been one of migration and persecution, so it is fitting that they come alongside of other immigrants. Second, they have a long experience with discrimination, caricatures, and hate speech, and they are seeing that phenomena surface now against immigrants. They feel that they cannot defend their own rights if they do not speak out for others, who are experiencing the same thing.
10. Andy Kristian’s micro-finance video
I’m meeting with my friend Andy this morning to discuss a cool project he’s working on. This is some rough (but beautiful!) footage he put together during a recent trip to Northern Uganda. Can’t wait to see the finished product.
1. The lasting legacy of Lesslie Newbigin
Michael Goheen writes for Q Ideas about the contributions Lesslie Newbigin made to Western Christianity and our understanding of mission:
It is a peculiarity of Western culture to isolate the domain of religion from the rest of life. Religion, he said, is a “set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty.” Thus religion includes the comprehensive worldviews that shape Western culture, like the modern scientific worldview in both its Marxist and its liberal-democratic-capitalist expressions. If the Western church is to be faithful to the gospel and its mission, we will need to work hard to understand the religious beliefs of our culture in order to extricate ourselves from idolatry.
2. Gerson on prudential politics
Michael Gerson writes for Capital Commentary about competing political priorities and the choices facing GOP voters especially:
[N]early every political choice involves the weighing of competing priorities—freedom and the common good. This is the reason that prudence is the highest of political virtues. And prudence is exactly what some political ideologies lack. Socialism places an unbalanced emphasis on equality above all else—resulting in the routine violation of individual rights. Libertarianism places an unbalanced emphasis on autonomy above all else—resulting in a nation without airport security and food safety laws. Raising a single, pure, simple principle in politics can be powerful—but it is almost always dangerous. Complexity is the nature of politics. It is also the sign of a serious political thinker or candidate.
3. The gospel of immigration
Dr. Russell Moore, from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, urges us to remember the personhood of immigrants - documented or otherwise:
I’m amazed when I hear evangelical Christians speak of undocumented immigrants in this country with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” It’s horrifying to hear those identified with the Gospel speak, whatever their position on the issues, with mean-spirited disdain for the immigrants themselves. While evangelicals, like other Americans, might disagree on the political specifics of achieving a just and compassionate immigration policy, our rhetoric must be informed by more than politics, but instead by Gospel and mission.
4. Radical cartography
I find this kind of stuff fascinating: a Yale professor named Bill Rankin created a map of Chicago that shows racial and ethnic segregation in the city. It is here. Below is a spin-off map of Detroit from another guy named Eric Fisher. That one is here. If you click on the links you can see info on the various color designations.
Repaso: The legacy of Newbigin, Gerson on prudential politics, gospel of immigration, and radical cartography
1. The lasting legacy of Lesslie Newbigin
Michael Goheen writes for Q Ideas about the contributions Lesslie Newbigin made to Western Christianity and our understanding of mission:
2. Gerson on prudential politics
Michael Gerson writes for Capital Commentary about competing political priorities and the choices facing GOP voters especially:
3. The gospel of immigration
Dr. Russell Moore, from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, urges us to remember the personhood of immigrants - documented or otherwise:
4. Radical cartography
I find this kind of stuff fascinating: a Yale professor named Bill Rankin created a map of Chicago that shows racial and ethnic segregation in the city. It is here. Below is a spin-off map of Detroit from another guy named Eric Fisher. That one is here. If you click on the links you can see info on the various color designations.