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On Story: With Eugene Peterson
I just finished reading Bono’s autobiographical tome, Surrender, and was delighted to find out that the great lyricist was a friend of the late Eugene Peterson. Peterson pastored for thirty years before becoming professor of spiritual theology at Regent in Vancouver, B.C. In my last post I shared excerpts from a conversation I had with him about rest. What follows is what he told me about “story”—excerpted from a conversation we had while he was still a prof and I was starting out as one. SG: In the academic environment it’s easy to intellectualize everything. How can we keep from developing the kind of mentality that would view the Trinity as…
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Leader, Do You Have a Book in You?
Back when I was in high school living two miles outside of Washington, D.C., my parents took me to visit The Library of Congress. As I stood eyeing walls of books, millions of them from floor to ceiling, it occurred to me that a whole lot of people publish. And that number has continued to skyrocket. Today the Library of Congress contains more than 74 million manuscripts—about one for every five Americans. So why in the world would you want to add to that stack by writing a book of your own? Write because you have better data. Maybe you’ve taken a look at all the books on the market…
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Art Saves Lives
I just finished reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. The student who brought me the book also sent me a link to a transcript in which the author told about his 97-year-old cousin, Helen, a Polish Holocaust survivor: “She started telling me this story of how, in the ghetto, they were not allowed books. If you had a book … the Nazis could put a gun to your head and pull the trigger—books were forbidden. And she used to teach under the pretense of having a sewing class . . . a class of about twenty little girls, and they would come in for…
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Appia’s Story
Today my city, Colossae, lies buried under a mound of dirt in Turkey, awaiting excavation financing. But if you’ll come with me on a journey through time—two thousand years back—you’ll find me living there with my husband, Philemon, and my son, Archippus. Colossae is located in Phyrgia, a region that sits on a rocky ridge above a branch of the Maeander River. Its waters plunge into a chasm and disappear underground for a half-mile. A few miles away, Mt. Cadmus towers over us, jutting up two miles into the clouds. People pass through here on their way east to the Euphrates, and most of these travelers come from the port…
