Where Goodness Still Grows
Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy
Thomas Nelson, January 2020
Where Goodness Still Grows challenges evangelical culture and rediscovers a faith deeply rooted in a return to Jesus Christ’s life and ministry.
The evangelical church in America has reached a crossroads. Social media and recent political events have exposed the fault lines that exist within our country and our spiritual communities. Millennials are leaving the church, citing hypocrisy, partisanship, and unkindness as reasons they can’t stay.
In this book, Amy Peterson laments the corruption and blind spots of the evangelical church and the departure of so many from the faith. But she refuses to give up hope.
Where Goodness Still Grows dissects the moral code of American evangelicalism and puts it back together in a new way. Amy writes as someone intimately familiar with, fond of, and also deeply critical of the world of conservative evangelicalism. She writes as a woman and a mother, as someone invested in the future of humanity, and as someone who just needs to know how to teach her kids what it means to be good. She reimagines virtue as a tool, not a weapon; as wild, not tame; as embodied, not written. Reimagining specific virtues, such as kindness, purity, modesty, hospitality, and hope, Amy finds that if we listen harder and farther, we will find the places where goodness still grows.
“Readers will find [Peterson’s] courageous exposure of American evangelicalism’s watered-down version of Christianity eye-opening, convicting, refreshing, and inspiring.”
—Carolyn Custis James, author, Finding God in the Margins and Malestrom
“If the church of your childhood has broken your heart–particularly, politically–if your faith foundations have been shaken by betrayal and complicity, it might seem quaint to turn toward virtues. And yet what are we yearning for but embodied goodness? Amy has given us a well-researched, beautifully written, strong book about the virtues necessary for the apocalypse. We need to lean in further to discernment, lament, love, and hospitality, not in a weak be nice sort of way but in the muscular, lean way that holds on to hope out of faith disguised as sheer stubbornness. This book is one part lament, one part hope, and entirely necessary for these days.”
—Sarah Bessey, author, Miracles and Other Reasonable Things and Jesus Feminist