Ep. 436 Amar Peterman - Loving Your Neighbor Across Real Difference

In this conversation, Amar Peterman and I get into the slow, local, unglamorous work of becoming neighbors across real difference. We talk about the table as the place where the common good gets built, and why so many of us are far more comfortable playing host than being hosted - flinging our doors open without ever considering who actually walks through them. We get into hospitality as displacement, an accompaniment that refuses to leave, Thomas learning you can't reason your way to resurrection, and an imagination that can see life where everything around us insists there's only division. Here's the challenge: we have to learn to receive before we can ever give, to love people beyond their labels, and to start right where we are, with the one neighbor in front of us.

Amar D. Peterman is a constructive theologian working at the intersection of faith and public life. He is the founder of Scholarship for Religion and Society LLC and the former assistant director of civic networks at Interfaith America. Peterman holds an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and is currently a PhD student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His writing and research have been featured in Sojourners, Christianity Today, The Christian Century,The Fetzer Institute, The Berkley Forum, and more. He also publishes regularly on his Substack, This Common Life.

Amar's Book:

Becoming Neighbors

Amar's Recommendations:

Make Your Home in this Luminous Dark

Glimmerings

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Transcript

Amar Peterman: 0:00

Begin this slow work of loving your neighbors, of walking across the street and sharing life with the people around you, to smile at the people you you meet on the side of the road to help someone who is in need, even in the smallest of ways, and to begin to consider what would bring about the flourishing of all people in my community, even if it comes at a small inconvenience to myself, and then to consider what do I have to learn from the people around me.

Joshua Johnson: 0:41

Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we could make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. You know, years ago I was working with refugees, and I made a mistake I still think about. My hosts took me to lunch, and I paid for it behind their backs. I thought I was being kind, but they were furious. I'd taken something from them. It was the chance to be the giver to show me who they were, and it took me a long time to learn that I had to receive before I could ever become a good neighbor. My guest today is Amr Peterman. Amr grew up between worlds. He was an Indian kid adopted into a Polish Catholic town. He was raised in a white evangelical megachurch, and somewhere in there he was told in college that he'd have to choose between Christ and his own heritage, but one professor told him the opposite, that his Indianness made him a better Christian. His book, Becoming Neighbors, comes out of his long search for belonging, for knowing who he is, for working across difference in interfaith communities. And this is what I want you to know, that this book, Becoming Neighbors, isn't about being nicer to the people on your street. It's about something harder, whether we can live across real difference without flattening each other. First, we get into the table, and why Christians are so much more comfortable hosting than being hosted. We talk about giving up control, about a doctor named Paul Farmer, who refused to leave his patients, about Thomas reaching into the wounds and learning you can't reason your way to resurrection, you could only stand in front of it. You know, we live in a moment today that hands us every permission to believe the worst about each other. We have a polarized society, my camp, your camp, we don't know how to be good neighbors, and Amr is asking whether we can imagine something else, and where that might begin. So, ask yourself a question: Who's setting the table in your life, and what would it look like to let it be someone else? So, join us. Here is my conversation with Amr Peterman. Amr, welcome to Shifting Culture. So excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me.

Amar Peterman: 3:04

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Joshua Johnson: 3:05

Why has it been so difficult for, especially Christians, to embody the command of Jesus to love our neighbor, even though it's a core foundational command for what it looks like to follow Jesus?

Amar Peterman: 3:20

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the main reasons is that we often talk about loving our neighbor, and it's plastered on our church signs and slogans and mottos, and this and that, but when it comes to actually, actually walking across the street and talking with our neighbor who's in front of us, we have to encounter the complex reality of who they are, and that makes love, like any relationship, really difficult, and so I think we so often get hung up on people's yard signs, both digital and physical, and presume things about them, both one that they, we think they might not be capable of being loved, or let alone loved by us or that they're not worthy of love, and so the encouragement of the book and the desire to get local is to say let's try to love our neighbors beyond their yard signs, that can look many different ways, and I think you know I grew up in very evangelical spaces, explicitly evangelical spaces, and often you know there's this sort of martyrdom complex within American evangelicalism, and so the idea was either like you love your neighbor so radically that you put yourself in harm's way. I don't think that's what Christ is calling us to. There's neighbors that I shouldn't love by knocking on their door or going on to their property or anything like that, but there's other ways that I can love them. There's also within that this idea that it needs to be this big, grandiose thing, like we need to change people's lives in the way that we love them in this immediate interaction, and I think so often neighbor love is slow and gradual work. It doesn't need to be this gigantic thing that we do, it can be. As simple as, like, rolling someone's trash can in on garbage day. I'm in the Midwest, we have lots of snow, you know. I've had neighbors come and plow my driveway. They didn't say anything, they didn't ask for anything in return, but I felt deeply loved by them, because they saw a tangible need that was in front of me, and without asking, went ahead and did something that, in my opinion, not very pleasant to do, and so those are small acts of neighbor love, and they seem at times, especially when the world appears to be falling apart, so trivial, but they reinforce the humanity of our neighbors and seeing the needs that exist before all of us, and encounter that and respond to it in a meaningful way, and I think that over time builds up a deep sense of belonging and community in a neighborhood.

Joshua Johnson: 5:48

What are you seeing now in the culture that this is a necessary topic that we have to become neighbors, that we have to like look across difference and reach out and say there is something between us, and I could actually sit with you, listen, be curious, and actually have a conversation.

Amar Peterman: 6:08

There's so much in this world that tears us apart, and it seems like our culture and our society gives us every permission to embrace believing the worst thing about one another. If I want to believe that you know, I see my neighbor once, and I think that they are this radical white supremacist who hates me because they didn't smile when I look back at them. There's little in our society that would say no, maybe reconsider what that looks like, or if there's something more happening, they're getting outside of yourself to consider how that person may be interacting or feeling that day. The call to become neighbors is a call to see one another beyond this. It's a opportunity to live into this Christlike vision of what it would mean to be together and to love one another in a moment when we're given all of these permissions, I say in the book that we actually become a people who give a damn about the people around us and in our communities, and so often we don't, and we don't have to, unless they look like us, sound like us, believe the same things as us. That's why the table is such a relevant, I think, illustration in the book to say that the common good is cultivated around a shared table, not found, not that we build the ideological explorer to go out and find the common good and bring it back to our communities, but that it is built. It is when people across lines of difference, whether that be religious, cultural, linguistic, political, etc. differences come together and say, what is a shared good for our community? What can lead us to all have not individual flourishing, but shared flourishing, a communal flourishing. And that's why I think the task of becoming neighbors is so important today, because as Christians, this is a central call for the Christian life that so often gets hyper individualized, hyper specified to say that we show neighbor love to specific people when it meets our own conditions or our own benefit. Yeah, I get into that little bit, and when I talk about Augustine's framework of use versus enjoyment, that Augustine says that God gives us some things to use and some things to enjoy, and that which we enjoy are for our ultimate love. There's nothing beyond them. We love them simply because they are. There's theological debates. If theologians who are listening can push back and say that there are times where Augustine says the three things worthy of enjoyment are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In other times, he equivocates a bit and says that neighbor fits into that category, and I think in my reading neighbor has to fit into that category. I think we have to love our neighbors because they are worthy of love in and of themselves. Of course, we are, as Christians, loving God through that, because God calls us to love our neighbors, but when we see our neighbors as something to use, so that we can love God, then we're not actually loving our neighbor as well, we're seeing through them to something beyond them, and I want in the book for the idea of becoming neighbors to be this encounter, this intimate and in our moment radical encounter of seeing people in the fullness of who they are and choosing to love them.

Joshua Johnson: 9:23

How does someone like you? How does an Amer from Indian descent become a poker player in Wisconsin? Like, what is.. what does that look like? What's your story? How did you get here?

Amar Peterman: 9:36

I was born in New Delhi, in northern India, and as an infant I was adopted and brought to the United States, and was raised in a Polish Catholic neighborhood just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, called Pulaski, and so my peers in public school and growing up were almost all Polish Catholics, and so I grew up in that space, and all my friends were going to confirmation. Education, but I went to church down the road at the neighboring town at a white evangelical mega church, and so they had thoughts about the Catholics in our community and in our, in our area, and I had to kind of meet this weird reconciling of my friends are all these Catholics doing this, and but evangelicals say that Catholics are this and that, and we shouldn't agree with them, and so I was trying to, as an evangelical, evangelized to my Catholic friends, but in both spaces I was trying to find my place as an Indian American who had very different experiences than the people around me, or at least I received those same experiences in very different ways, and had questions as I was growing up, and seeing, I think, kind of the early moments of America's racial reckoning that really came to light in the late 20 teens and early 2020s or still continuing with that today, but neither my school teachers or my pastors really had an answer to the questions I had about the relationship between Christianity and culture, race, belonging, injustice, and so in public school I played in the polka band to try to fit in in the mega church I grew up in. I was a worship leader on staff, one of several to try to fit in, to try and find my place, things that brought me joy that felt like a like a central part of myself that I could align with these spaces, and yet there was a deep sense of unbelonging in both, and so the early stages of this book, before I even knew it would ever be a book, was reckoning with both spaces implicitly and especially in the church explicitly offered visions of the common good, but neither included me, and so I ended up going to Bible college, and somewhat ironically, a white evangelical Bible college in downtown Chicago to try to find answers to that question, and in many ways I heard a lot of the same things pastors and professors told me that I would have to decide between my Christian faith or my Indian-ness, that I either have to find my identity in Christ and leave my Indian-ness behind, or I could embrace my Indian identity, but that that was antithetical to my Christian identity, because Indianism was Indian-ness was coded with paganism and heathenism and otherness. None of my other white colleagues and peers, you know, were told that they had to leave something behind to become a Christian, but the one professor who helped me through this was who the book is dedicated to, Ashish Varma, who is not a professor there anymore, but as an Indian American theologian who was very elusive and would study by literally a lamp in his office, so it looked like no one was there, and there was a day that I just knocked on his door, I'd heard of him and said, I don't know what to do with all of this, I I've tried to leave my Indian-ness behind, but I can't, it's it's a part of me. What do I do? And he essentially said,"Oh, I don't know, but I'll come talk to you about it. And so that began a long relationship of him both saying explicitly that his Indianness made him a better Christian, and his Christian faith made him a better Indian, but more importantly, he lived that out in the theologies that he read that were that came from across the globe that were rooted deeply in in theologies and practices of liberation and justice and love and shared flourishing, and he really set me on a path that brought me to this book. His table in his office was one of the first of belonging, where I felt like I could truly be myself, where the questions that I had were met with meaningful conversation and questions in return of what my role in all of this is, and so, yeah, from India to Polish Catholic neighborhood and white evangelicalism to Bible college, and I was out in seminary on the East Coast for a few years, and that solidified a lot of the kind of theological underpinnings of the book. There's lots of footnotes for such a short book. It was very intentional to say you all should know I'm in conversation with these folks, and if you like an idea here, like go read more. There's so much here. This is just scratching the surface,

Joshua Johnson: 14:21

there's specific spaces, so like when you were growing up in your neighborhood, so Polish Catholic space, there was probably not a lot of difference in that area in your white evangelical megachurch, there's not a lot of difference as far as either people of different ethnicities, they're, you know, they're the same as a homogeneous group, probably. There may be some differences. Do you think that it's harder to go across difference if there's no proximity, like if we don't have people that are literally next to us? Us do we get blinded to what it looks like to go towards difference.

Amar Peterman: 16:46

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I think our human tendency is to go to homogeneity, to embrace people who are like us. There's an.. there's just a natural, I think, in an inherent tendency to be drawn towards what is most comfortable, which is likely what is most similar, but I think you're exactly right in that when we do that, we miss our blind spots, and I think we see that in theological traditions that are very tied to a doctrinal rigidity that maps onto a specific way of being in culture and language and people in devotion, where huge swaths of people are missed, crucial issues are missed or wrongly interpreted. You caught me this morning as we're recording Christianity Today released a review of my book, that was something it's sticking in my mind a bit, but one of their premises was that my the question I'm trying to answer, is are Christians too rude to their neighbors, and I was like, yes, and also Christians have developed entire systems and theologies to exclude, marginalize, demonize their neighbors who are different from them. The call of the book is to move past these broad assumptions and to encounter again the reality of the people that we demonize, the people that we say are too far, too far gone to be brought into the fold of whether it's redemption or community or belonging, and I think the reason that we, that you chalk up the book to saying,"Oh, well, Christians are being too rude, is that you're missing the blind spot of these broader schemas that inherently exclude people in our own communities because we uphold these kind of doctrinal systems that place them in a certain category.

Joshua Johnson: 18:39

What I was thinking, and I was just, you know, as I was reading your book, and I was listening to some of the interviews that you've already given. The question I want to ask is, do you think that exclusivity of Christians saying that, hey, we have Jesus, He's the way, the truth, the life, no one comes to the Father except for Him, like it's exclusive. I think if I'm growing, growing up in the faith, like I did, I think inherent in me is like I have the right answer and everybody else is wrong, and so it makes me kind of like look down on people, just but not intentionally, it's just, yeah, like baked into me, like how does something like that actually hinder the way that we see other people?

Amar Peterman: 19:27

Yes, yes, absolutely. So I have stumbled into and then stayed in these interfaith civic pluralism spaces, and I've been leading in those spaces as a Christian, and there's inevitably when I organize a conference or a gathering of some kind with people across different traditions, there's always at least one Christian who will come up to me and say, "When is the part where we share the gospel? Like, when do we get to evangelize? Like, is it at, is it over a meal, is there like a social hour we where we debate one another? And I say, "Wrong table, that's not the point of this, of the space, you Christian are invited to show up in the fullness of your beliefs and your tradition, and everything that that entails. So is your Muslim neighbor, so is your Jewish neighbor, so is your Hindu neighbor. This is what shared flourishing looks like, I think, especially for evangelicals. There's this, you know, rightly an evangelical impulse to evangelize, to share the gospel, but when I look at the life and ministry of Jesus, I don't see Jesus begging people to follow him, I see Jesus living out of the reality that he is God, he knows that he is God, and he preaches and ministers and says that without equivocation, and then he moves on to the next city, and the next place, and sometimes

Joshua Johnson: 20:45

he tries to purge followers by saying, if you don't eat my flesh and drink my blood, you can't follow me, and they're like, okay, I'm out. Yeah,

Amar Peterman: 20:54

exactly. And so Jesus lives out of this reality that he is God, and some people choose to follow him, and others don't, and I think the task of Christians in this space is to say we have exclusive truth claims about who we believe God is that inherently butt up against what other people believe about what and who God is. I don't think the task of the shared table is to stop everything and say we need to agree on who exactly God is in order to work together. Instead, I think the task is to say we are going to bring these differences together, and we're going to find a shared good spaces where we have commonality beliefs that are in values that our own exclusive. Beliefs and who God is leads us to that might look very similar, and then we're going to seek the good of our community. I think when Christians do this well, we offer a deeply compelling vision of the Christian life, and I think that rubs my evangelical friends and former pastors and colleagues the wrong way to say you're not like explicitly like saying the gospel, proclaiming the gospel, and I found that that's been broadly ineffective, if not detrimental, to seeking the common good for our communities, because we're immediately leading with our differences, immediately leading with the thing that will not be resolved, rather than saying, as a society, as residents in a shared place, we have a task of caring for this place together, despite our differences, and through our differences, there is a good question of what happens. I mean, I use the potluck to illustrate this, that people have unique dishes from which represent their beliefs, their cultures, their languages, their values that they bring to the community, and we offer them together at a shared table, and we learn from one another, and we see our own beliefs and values differently in light of what other people believe. Christians veer far from this, because they don't think there's anything to learn from the people around them, because we would say, oh, we have these exclusive claims, and other people are wrong, so what benefit is it to hear what my neighbor thinks about whether it's our the problems of our world or whether it's a theological question, because clearly we have the right answer. That the task of the potluck and of the shared table is to cultivate a desire to know and love the people around us, again to enjoy them because God calls us to love them, to see them in the fullness of who they are, which includes the beliefs that they hold dearly, and to understand them because they're something that are they're valuable because our neighbor believes them, and if we want to love our neighbors, if we want to know them well, then we have to know what they believe and how they see the world and understand it and understand their place within it, and so I think Christians are so often tempted to say that we have nothing to learn from everyone else because of these rigid doctrinal claims, and the invitation is to say there's so much we have to learn things that challenge our blind spots as a tradition and within our specific communities, denominations, theological perspectives, even more blind spots that can be challenged by other Christians and by people well outside the Christian tradition.

Joshua Johnson: 24:09

So, you're talking about potluck at the table and setting the table so that the community can come together to actually sit, ask questions, be curious, listen to one another, seek the common good for our communities, and the table, I mean, the table in the Christian tradition, Jesus is essential, it's a bedrock of the faith, of like, hey, this is who we are as we come to the table, the table is really crucial, my question is around hospitality, so if, say, if I set the table and I'm inviting people in, I could do a couple of different things. One is I could just try to get my thing across, and I'm not actually listening to other people, I'm not, I'm just inviting people in, so that they could maybe be a part of who I am, and then to sometimes I get that if I'm a guest somewhere else, how could we all have a different like hospitality posture at the table, like we're all guests at the table, like we have a different host, like it's maybe not one of us, it's not about us who we are, like, how does hospitality work in a way that brings honor and dignity to all people, and I'm not like showing paternalism and trying to make people who I am.

Amar Peterman: 25:33

So often Christians are used to playing host, which again is rooted often in a good practice of hospitality, of saying we want to be generous with what we have. We have, especially in the United States, broadly greater resources, greater access to things, a larger space. And so we go, we want to host a community potluck. Where should we do it? Well, are we have this gigantic sanctuary, and we have this industrial-sized kitchen that's attached to it, and everyone can just show up, and we have a parking lot for everyone, and it'll be so logistically, pragmatically, it's the easiest thing, but then that happens over and over, and all of a sudden we have to question why do Christians keep posting everything, and what does that mean for our neighbors? Do they ever feel like they get to have ownership possession of the space together. I talk a bit in the book about a non-possessive vision of the table, a common space that no one gets to claim ownership of, and Christians get really uncomfortable in those spaces, because what happens when we go to a community center and we have a potluck there and it's. Is more chaotic, and there's more logistics to figure out, but and there's not the familiarity of like who gets, who's gonna say the first prayer, or do we pray at all, or how do we structure this, and what do we say, and who sits next to who, and this and that, but that uncomfort, or that discomfort, is exactly the point, and even more to say, what if we host it somewhere else? What if you know the good water down the road has a practice of languor? They have, they give out food every day, and they're they're making their way hosting people in their community and doing just fine. What if, instead of being in a sanctuary adorned with crosses or stained glass or ambient, you know, worship sounding music. We go to a place that's playing like Bollywood jams, and people are sitting on the floor, and you know, instead of at these tables, and we're eating cuisine that's different than what we're typically used to eating, or, you know, I'm speaking of predominantly white Americans would be eating this too is an opportunity for humility and hospitality, and I think this, this is the work of a shared table, and considering, you know, I draw from Matt Kaming, who has this brief illustration in this, he has this book that came out a while ago called Christian hospitality and Muslim immigration in an age of fear. I don't know how we got, how he got that title through, or a great

Joshua Johnson: 28:09

title, though. Such a good title.

Amar Peterman: 28:13

Yeah, I think Jamie wrote the forward for that book as well. But Matt has this brief illustration of walls, doors, and tables, and he says that some Christians build doctrinal walls to keep everyone else out, and they put, they put guards at the gate. Other Christians fling open their doors and welcome everyone in, but don't consider who's actually showing up and how we would exist together in that space. The table, as a practice of hospitality, is a considered welcoming. It is considering who is showing up and how they might arrive, what needs they might have. I think you know someone who's who's disabled, that accessibility is a huge part of this. We might have the best hospitable intentions in the world, and then host it in a space that doesn't have a ramp for wheelchairs, or isn't accessible to some folks, or could think of an interfaith context the dietary restrictions that certain traditions have, and considering what that would mean to invite people across religious difference to show up. This all ties into this practice of what hospitality truly looks like, and for Christians, sometimes the most hospitable thing we can do is displacing ourselves because we might have the most logistically efficient way of doing things, and instead embracing the inefficiency of hospitality to slow down, to let someone else be the host, to be uncomfortable in a way that challenges again our blind spots, our assumptions, what we think is going to happen in a specific space, and be open to that. So, I think these are all these are all practices of hospitality, even as we're giving up the role of of playing host.

Joshua Johnson: 30:56

So, what are some, some roles then to be a good guest? So, I look at Jesus as he goes throughout his life. He's not hosting much of anything, he's being guests at people's homes, he's being invited in. How can we follow the way of Jesus?

Amar Peterman: 31:15

Yeah, I think this goes back to that point of desire. If we're going to, I talk in the book about the table, and if, if we're going to show up, sit in the corner, and put our hands over our ears, then just leave. There's no point in being there. There's no desire to actually know our neighbors. And so, if we're going to, you know, go to a meal that's hosted somewhere else and say, I don't like, you know, I don't like this food, it's too smelly, or I don't want to sit in this way, or I don't want to be a part of this, or I don't want to talk to these people, that's not practicing anything that Jesus did. The disposition of being hosted is one of deep charity and respect and openness to be willing to share our stories and experiences, but also, I mean, the book is rooted a lot in my, my own experience of organizing and learning from many community organizers who are alongside therapists, some of the best folks that who ask the best questions. Organizers and their in relational meetings are just a practice of belonging and care. More often than not, when I meet with an organizer, I feel like they genuinely want to know me. They want to know my story, where I came from. They're also great at reciprocating that when you ask them questions. Also, I suppose in therapy, the point isn't to have to have a conversation with therapists too. I mean, as part of their training, are great at asking provocative questions and. Not only getting one answer, but then picking up something and asking another. A good friend of mine is both a reverend and a psychotherapist, and when we do a Bible study on Tuesday nights at the University of Chicago, and I pick up on the way that he's so pastoral, but also bringing in his counseling background and saying, "Oh, what I'm hearing in that is this, or it sounds like there's something behind this, and that to me, I sit back and just watch the skill with which he is engaging sometimes with strangers and making them feel so loved as they're sharing their own stories and digging deeper into that, and so, as you mentioned, this practice of asking good questions can cultivate the sense of belonging, when we truly enter into a space to want to know more about the people around us, where they come from, the stories that they have, the values, the fears, the vulnerabilities that they experience, and that they feel about our communities, our countries, our world.

Joshua Johnson: 33:39

So now, once we're at the table, we're good guests, we, you know, let other people host, we have conversations, we hear stories, we know our neighbors, we're starting to love them. How does this then come into the common good to say, how does our community flourish together? How do we see that there are needs that our neighbors have that maybe we can actually fight for, or we can stand with them in their needs, or their needs that that we have as we come in, that they can come and be with us. In what does it look like to go from being nice and not rude, like into actually the common good for the community,

Amar Peterman: 34:26

yeah. I think this is where those practices of humility, sacrifice, I talk in the book about several practices of neighbor love, and some that you would imagine are certainly there, compassion, humility, which I wrote in Christ's incarnation, lamentation is sometimes put in those practices of neighbor love, but sometimes excluded. But I think being able to, you know, as the scriptures say, mourn with those who mourn can be a deep practice of love and care, to not jump to positive sayings or little, you know, script pieces of scripture that you know God is everything in control, which sure, yes, but also in mourning, like let people mourn, like that's a deep practice of neighbor love, but then to move towards, as you mentioned, like these niceties to truly seeking a common good moves into these practices, practices of resonance and accompaniment, where we are not only in proximity to the people around us, but joining in a common tune, you could say, where our song, songs of where we come from and where we're going, begin to resonate, begin to align, harmonize with the stories and songs of the people in our community, that's where the common good begins to take shape, where we not only see ourselves as singing two different songs, but see how they come into parallel with one another, how our values and beliefs lead us towards shared action towards a common good. When we prioritize the people in our community and the concerns that we have over our differences and say we draw from very different wells of wisdom and spirituality to come to the space, and yet we are both here to do this work together for accompaniment. I draw from the the example of Paul Farmer, who's a lofty example. There's there are not many Paul farmers in the world, folks who do this exemplary work of building state of the art hospitals, and in countries that the medical community has overlooked, or said it's impossible to help certain folks, and Farmer, alongside Gustavo Gutierrez, develops this practice of accompaniment that says for him, as a medical practitioner, I'm I'm not just going to help you in the short term when you come into my office and you have an ailment and I'm going to treat it, he says I'm with you for the long haul, I'm going to walk with you, and he literally did that. He went and traveled an unreasonable amount of time and space to be with his patients in their communities, especially in Haiti, and he walked with them and journeyed with them and did this, and you know, in ways that were, I'm sure, inconvenient and uncomfortable for him, and yet he cared so deeply about the people around him that he said,'We're going to journey together, not until your immediate need is fixed, but until you say I'm ready to go on my own as the one being served, as the one who is in need, and I think, as communities, the practice of accompaniment then moves us from we're going to solve this immediate thing, you know, there's a, you know, busy street, and it needs a stop sign, so that our children can play safely, and that the bikers, and you know, folks walking their dogs, all can feel like, can feel comfortable and safe as they're doing the these. Things, and saying we're not just going to meet this immediate need, we're going to continue this work together. We're going to build a community that truly seeks the flourishing of the people around us, and that means talking with more people, getting more people involved in the work that we're doing together, hearing what more concerns and needs are, and then organizing and moving towards meeting them together across our lines of differences, and in the process building relationship with one another, that we're not just, you know, using one another to seek this shared end, but doing so because it benefits the people that we know and the people that we love.

Joshua Johnson: 38:17

People are scared to go across difference, they're entrenched into their camp. They don't want to talk to others, they want to win the argument. They say my side is right, your side is wrong. It's like us versus them, and everything. How do we have a different imagination to say this sort of thing is actually possible. We can become neighbors, we can work across difference, we can see each other for the full humanity of all people, of like, give dignity and respect to them. How do we get a different imagination? How do we not stay stuck in what we see in front of us, but actually then dream into something new and better and more flourishing for our communities.

Amar Peterman: 39:10

You know, we're recording this the first week of Eastertide. On Sunday, we celebrated the resurrection. A week ago, we were celebrating, lamenting, pondering Good Friday. On Monday, I was asked to preach to a bunch of preachers who had just spent their past week exhausted in church to do a short chapel for them, and considered what, what is there to say to these folks who have pondered and sat with these texts, you know, not just the past week, but for, you know months and months leading up to this, you know, the this apex, this pinnacle of the Christian tradition, and I turned to the story of Thomas. Thomas had every reason to doubt the resurrection. It was reasonable to say someone does not come back from the dead. He saw Jesus die, he mourned Jesus' death, and now he's being told that Jesus is Jesus is alive again, and Thomas wants to reason his way to the resurrection, and when Jesus encounters him and says, 'Put your hand in my side, and then I meditated on Cavagio, has this beautiful depiction of this scene, and Jesus takes Thomas' finger and he guides it into his side in this way that where there's no pain or frustration or anger, there's this deep peace in Jesus' face and confusion and intrigue in Thomas's face, and Thomas is trying to, I think, in that moment Jesus is showing Thomas that you can't reason your way to the resurrection, you can only stand before what defies all reason, what defies the laws of causality, the laws of nature that God dictates, and Jesus stands before Thomas Risen. In the book, I talk about a resurrected imagination, and that's what I think that Jesus is cultivating in Thomas in this moment, is to say beyond the present death that you see, there is a resurrected life ahead. There's so much in this world. I think we wake up each day with more and more reason to say this could never happen. There's no reason to love my neighbors. There's no reason to believe that there's something good for our communities, and yet I think those who live with a resurrected imagination, who can see the life that exists beyond this present death, can see this futural vision, can even anticipate a vision, a moment where the world is marked by a sense of belonging and love and care, and if not the world, at least our neighborhood, and that's where the I talk, you know, in the book, it's the common good made local. To say, start there, start in your neighborhood, start with one neighbor across from you, and try to cultivate a belonging. Try to imagine what it would mean to exist, to live, to be with one another, even if the world doesn't end. If we have to continue on in this way of loving and living beside one another, and so that I think is is the hope of the resurrection, is to defy what feels so dauntingly obvious in our world, the hate, despite the division, the malice, the polarization are objectively real realities that we have to consider, and yet I think the persuasive, the compelling hope of the Christian is to continue to work and live knowing that a better future is before us, because we can see what God has promised, because we live in light of what is deemed un. Reasonable, and we see this in the early church, and they mess it up over and over and over, and yet they continue our call back to this moment of saying we join together across our differences, even as Pentecost fades and differences arise, and people are selfish, and hostility is fostered. The church continues on, and I think that's a vision of how our communities can live together, continue to love and be together, marked by belonging and care, is living in light of this resurrection hope.

Joshua Johnson: 43:10

When I think of America, I think we're all Thomases before we actually encounter the resurrected Jesus, that we're trying to reason our way into faith and to believe, and we forgot that we actually just need to encounter Jesus and receive God's love. For me, if I'm going to love my neighbor, if I'm going to love God, if I'm going to love the world, I need to receive the love of God, so I can first do that, so that my desires are rightly ordered. My love isn't weird, because it's really about me, right? If I'm not receiving God's love, my love is all about what I can give to the world, what I could give to my neighbor. If I receive God's love, I'm actually then I could see people through the lens of God's eyes. I can love people through God's love and not my love. What is then the role of receiving love? Being people of love, we actually have to receive it. How do we receive, so that we can not just do it out of our own selfish ambition, and gain.

Amar Peterman: 44:26

This is a great question, and I think it's so, it's so difficult. It's hard to, it's hard to receive love because of the humility it takes to be open in this way. My mind goes to, you know, there's this reform doctrine. I'm not. I say I'm as reformed as Schleiermacher will take me, but reformed scholars say that in Christ's incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, everything that Christ merits is not for himself, but to immediately give it away, to give it to us, to give it to all of creation, to give it to those who love God. The task then is to be able to, as you say, to receive that love, to receive those merits that Christ had has attained in this radical work that we just celebrated on Sunday, and so often I think what keeps us from experiencing this is our own uncomfortability with receiving love in this way, unless we can control it by creating systems, doctrines, you know, ways in which that we get to control the way that we've received salvation, and then get to dictate to others how it's received, and this and that. I'm only a few pages into, you just talked with Jamie Smith, who wrote the forward for my book, has his own wonderful book that I'm, yeah, just a few pages in, and he's he's dwelling on this notion of unknowing a god that exists in and beyond our conceptions of being a god who is love in this radically expansive way, and I think a way of receiving love is embracing this unknowing, this mysticism, this this refusal to try and control something that we've been given freely, and to receive it with the ambiguity and unknowing that accompanies it, because it comes from something from so far beyond that we cannot constrain, that's something that is truly infinite, and in doing that, I think that creates a disposition to then be able to receive love from the people around us who are finite, who are more knowable, because if we can accept the love of God and all of its unknowing, then I think hopefully we can begin to cultivate a disposition where we can receive the love of our neighbors, not in a way that it needs to, we feel its obligation to reciprocate or to condition or to equivocate and say I'm not worthy of this, but instead to say thank you, and then in return, as we live together to show that love back, to receive that love, and then, as Christ did, to give that goodness away to others, despite what they believe, who they claim God is. These are this is the ecosystem of love and goodness that I think cultivates shared flourishing,

Joshua Johnson: 47:21

working with Arab Muslim immigrants, I remember someone taking me out to lunch, because we're in America, this is what we do. We go out to a restaurant, so they're trying to be a little American and show hospitality our way. And I paid for the meal after they invited me, I paid for it behind their back. They were so mad. They were so angry that I wouldn't receive their hospitality, moving into then going overseas, working with war refugees, work with Syrian refugees. I really said I need to help these people, they're in such dire need, which they are, they need. I couldn't figure out how to accept any hospitality from them, but they're overwhelmingly hospitable, that it is like they're going to like, like shower you with hospitality, it's just their highest value. And so, as soon as I learned to receive it, and I would learn to receive their love and their hospitality, and I didn't try to fix them or help them, or it wasn't about my need to be helpful to other people, but it was about me actually receiving. I started to see people as friends, as neighbors. We were together in this, and it wasn't me coming in to save the day anymore. It was us together, like moving on the same road in the same direction, and it was the receiving part that helped me. I needed to receive before I could actually become a neighbor to somebody else. It was so crucial and key, and it made all the difference.

Amar Peterman: 49:01

I love that. I love that.

Joshua Johnson: 49:03

So, what is your hope for becoming neighbors? What do you hope that people get from this?

Amar Peterman: 49:08

Yeah, I mean, the book I talk in the beginning about how there are so many books that rightly diagnose where everything has gone wrong and all that is wrong in the world. The attempt of the book is not to prescribe how you should love your neighbors, what you should specifically do, but offer a prescriptive vision of this holy ought of who we ought to be in this future vision of what might be a community marked by belonging and care, and so my hope for this book is that in the pages and the footnotes, folks would be encouraged and inspired to try to make real some of what I talk about here, and to use this as a launching point to learn more, to begin this slow work of loving your neighbors, of walking across the street and sharing life with the people around you, to smile at the people you, you meet on the side of the road to help someone who is in need, even in the smallest of ways, and to begin to consider what would bring about the flourishing of all people in my community, even if it comes at a small inconvenience to myself, and then to consider what do I have to learn from the people around me, and so, as someone who's an introverted, you know, as an introvert, when I see, you know, the flyer on my door for the next community potluck, like, I don't know if I want to go to, there's gonna be a lot of people I don't know, and what am I gonna do, and you know, I hope that if someone sees that flyer after they read this book, they go, "All right, I'm going to try. I'm going to bring you know, in the Midwest, we got our casseroles and our hot dishes, and I'm going to make a hot dish, and I'm going to bring it, and I'm going to try to talk to my neighbors and see where they come from, and who they are, and why they're here, and what they're doing. It's the slow work of loving your neighbors, of being in community together, and I hope this small book can be an inspiration to begin doing that work together. A

Joshua Johnson: 51:07

couple quick questions, Amr, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

Amar Peterman: 51:12

Slow down, 21 you want to be 3030, you want to be 18. I miss those, I miss the days of, you know, for as emotionally exhausting as those I went to Bible college, that the 2am theological debates about Calvinism, as exhausting as they were, those were fun times, and so slow down, treasure them. I think of the front porches I sat on in seminary, and the drinks and conversations that we shared with dear friends that inspired much of this book. Don't rush to the next thing, just slow down and enjoy what's in front of you.

Joshua Johnson: 51:48

Yeah, enjoyment. We talked that about that a lot, right? Absolutely. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend

Amar Peterman: 51:56

Jamie's book. Loving Jamie's book. Make your home in this luminous dark. Listen to your interview with him, and then Glimmerings is a book that's co-written by Mirsa Wolf and Christian Wyman. Wyman is someone who I read through the process of writing my book, because I wanted to get out of academic jargon and into this more poetic, lyrical prose that I think Wyman does so, so, so well as a poet, as an essayist, he takes these lofty concepts and makes them pithy and beautiful, and so my attempt was to try to do the same, and he is this exchange of letters between him and Wolf, and they come from very different, they're both colleagues at Yale, they're friends, and they have such different approaches to the Christian tradition, one is a. Poet and another as a systematic theologian, and it's such a fun exchange of the way that they're loving one another in their letters, and also coming from such different sides. It's very, it's a very fun read.

Joshua Johnson: 52:52

I love Glimmering, such a beautiful book. Armor Becoming Neighbors is actually out now, anywhere books are sold, so people could go and get it. Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to how could they connect with you and what you're doing.

Amar Peterman: 53:05

Yeah, I'm on Substack. I have a newsletter called This Common Life that I write on regularly. I'm also on Instagram and Threads, and I think I'm too old for it, but I'm trying to make my way through TikTok, and so you know, if you want those quick, snappy, as snappy as I can get, which is not very, you know, if I can hook your attention in the first two seconds, I'll have done something, but I'm on TikTok as well, and trying to make that work, but those are the main places to find me.

Joshua Johnson: 53:31

Excellent. Well, Amr, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for helping us become neighbors to actually go across difference to actually say that there is a table here in our community that there's everybody could bring their dish to this potluck, that we could ask questions, that we can engage one another, that we can see people for who they truly are, and that we could actually bring some resonance and some harmony to our community, our life, that our stories and our songs can actually meld together, so that we could bring flourishing to who we are, and see the common good made local here in our communities. It was fantastic. So, thank you.

Amar Peterman: 54:07

Yeah, thank you for making the space.

Unknown: 54:17

Thank