Reading Hope in a Pandemic: A Review of Amy Peterson’s Where Goodness Still Grows
Katie Karnehm-Esh
In February, I read Amy Peterson’s second book, Where Goodness Still Grows (W Publishing Group, 2020). I enjoyed it and found Peterson’s exploration of nine virtues (Lament, Kindness, Hospitality, Purity, Modesty, Authenticity, Love, Discernment, and Hope) helpful and pleasant. I planned to write this review immediately.
Then, March and Covid-19.
My world became online classes, online church, online meetings, canceled plans, and fraught visits to the grocery store. I tried to practice yoga and go for walks and meditate and bake bread—anything to keep myself from wandering in circles around my living room and doom-scrolling the Internet. Peterson’s book began to feel like an abstraction I’d read in a foggy, long-ago world. Reviewing a book on goodness felt impossible.
Last week, I did two things: I bought a used spin bike, and I re-read Where Goodness Still Grows. Over two mornings, I pedaled on my porch as I read, realizing that this pleasant book in February had become essential reading in hot, unsettled July. Indeed, I wanted to know where goodness still grew in 2020. In our pandemic, our riots, our executions, our conspiracy theories, our immigration inhumanities, our forgotten polar ice caps, our neighbors dying of COVID and our neighbors mocking COVID and our neighbors blowing up fireworks and the app that lets you scream into Iceland…in all that is 2020, the ground feels too thin for goodness to take root.
But Peterson began this book in 2016, in the aftermath of the Trump election, when finding goodness in evangelical values also felt like scratching parched earth. “Around the time the leaves turned red, my apocalypse began,” Peterson writes in her first sentence. Her sense of pain and betrayal is visceral. In light of this betrayal, she asks, is anything from evangelicalism still good? Was it ever to begin with? She carefully begins to excavate the soil, and holds what she finds up to the light.
Peterson grounds her book of virtues with story: her evangelical childhood, her teenage trips to apologetics camp, her time in Southeast Asia, and her parenting and teaching in East Central Indiana. In “Lament” Peterson recalls standing on a cliff in Nassau watching her students learn the history of the slave trade in the Bahamas. In “Hospitality” she takes in a queer college student. In “Modesty” she tells her daughter another pair of pants might be immodest (my many, many pairs of pants blinked accusingly at me as I read this section). We get glimpses of introverted teenage Amy thinking about ontology and the meaning of life, as well as her less perfect moments—like her childhood self singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” outside a gay couple’s house. Peterson’s stories show her at various stages of living into these virtues, a crucial element in helping the reader grasp and internalize otherwise abstract ideas.
I have recommended this book to so many people for two reasons: Peterson’s reclamation of evangelical ideas, and her advocacy of women. She unblinkingly tackles evangelical failings: race, sexuality, indigenous rights, and poverty, to name a few. In her first chapter, “Lament,” the author is in the Bahamas, where her students are visiting an old slave site. On a cliff edge, artists have carved images of mourning women into cedar trees. They express their overt distress at being separated from their homeland and families immediately confronts the reader with slavery and abuse of women. Peterson then directs us to the sea below polluted by crude oil, reminding us of the way we’ve mistreated God’s creation. As she gazes at an especially questioning statue, she writes, “Women have a lot of painful questions for God.” She references “locker room talk,” the brutalization of women in war, and evangelical obsessions with tank top width and skirt lengths. But she also writes powerful depictions of females, both human and not. Torri, a Black community organizer in Marion, Indiana, helps us confront historical injustice. Leigh, a stranger in Southeast Asia, charges Amy’s electric bike in a demonstration of hospitality. Ruth the Moabite teaches us about devotion and welcoming the stranger. Tahlequah the mother whale teaches us how to mourn. The reader both sees how we have failed to live up to these virtues, and realizes new opportunities for embodying them.
Finally, a book of creative nonfiction requires beautiful language. Amy Peterson does not disappoint. At the end of her introduction, she writes that this isn’t intended to be a book of answers about virtue. Instead, she hopes “it may unmoor us from some of those traditions, and from a partial, whitewashed version of history, and leave us thrashing about in the deep for a while as we seek to find our footing again. And maybe we won’t find our footing again. Maybe, instead, we will learn to swim.” Well, throw me in Coach. I’m ready. The language stays clear and direct enough that readers will easily understand her points, but the language never falters.
In my favorite chapter, “Hope” (which I refer to as “the chicken chapter”), the author buys baby chicks. She lists all the reasons she didn’t have for buying the chicks—not because of cuteness or hunger or a desire to make her kids happy. It was the end of a long, cold gray winter in Indiana, and this is the first thing she wanted, so she bought them. “So when I finally wanted something—baby chicks—I bought them. They were the visible manifestation of my belief that spring would come.” The chapter moves back and forth between raising chickens, chicken terminology and history, meat production, ethical chicken slaughter, and spiritual metaphors for chickens.
I loved this chapter the first time I read it in my pre-pandemic haze. But this time, I noticed something new. Peterson never announces this as a book about reclaiming women from our culture and evangelicalism. But I realized as she strategically discussed the president’s boasting of groping women, the shooter in California who killed women for rejecting him, and even the way that female chickens are raised to be little more than breasts and thighs wrapped in plastic, that this is a book about how women can still find goodness somewhere in Christendom. Most touching is her reference of the verse about Jesus comparing himself to a mother hen. “Hope, I began to believe, does have something to do with feathers,” she concludes in homage to Emily Dickinson. Then: “Hope is being willing to find shelter under Jesus’ wings.”
Peterson opens the first chapters in the autumn of 2016, but by the end, it’s springtime. Her chickens have survived the winter. She is tilling ground, planting seeds, pulling weeds, watching plants grow. “Spring descended on all my mistakes, and vegetables grew,” she writes. “I chose to believe that nothing is ever wasted, that there is a God who sees neither women nor chickens as commodities, who watches us and weeps for us and will not rest until things are made right.” In short, she says, she chose hope. This might have seemed expected in February of 2020. In July, it feels audacious, and the only way forward.
Dr. Katie Karnehm-Esh, a 2002 alum of Indiana Wesleyan University, returned to the Midwest teach composition and creative writing courses in 2008 after completing her Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She mentors student editors of Indiana Wesleyan University’s literary magazine Caesura, co-leads a May Term Travel Writing class in Ireland, and teaches community yoga classes, all of which inspire her research and writing. Her essays and poetry have been published in Fourth Genre, The Cresset, The Other Journal, Topology, Whale Road Review, Barren Magazine and Windhover.