Loving the Actual Human in Front of You
A Feature Review of
Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local
Amar D. Peterman
Paperback: Eerdmans, 2026
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Reviewed by Pete Ford
Once Jesus was asked how to inherit eternal life. He replied by listing a double commandment: to love God and neighbor. Looking for a loophole, his interlocutor asked for clarity: “Who is my neighbor?” In response, Jesus told one of the most famous parables. Rather than limit who is my neighbor, Jesus tells us that we need to become neighbors to others. Love sees the stranger as a neighbor.
Amar Peterman joins a conversation on the church’s posture toward the world, found in books like James Davidson Hunter’s To Change the World, David Fitch’s Faithful Presence, and Stephen O. Presley’s Cultural Sanctification. Becoming Neighbors, a slim volume under 90 pages, provides a rich theological overview of neighborliness.
We often fear the “end of the world,” so we “go to great lengths to ensure that we are on the ‘winning’ side of history.” Quoting a song by Jensen McRae, Peterman instead asks, “What will we be to each other if the world doesn’t end?” How do we not merely “get along with” each other, but instead build strong community?
Peterman advocates for a posture toward the world that seeks the common good by loving our actual neighbors. Peterman brings his education in public theology and his experience with Interfaith America to bear. Like Jesus, Peterman focuses on how we can become neighbors, rather than waiting for others to be neighborly to us.
Chapter 1 deals with the image of the table, which has been so important to the Church. Peterman explores how the invitation of Jesus extends the Eucharist table outward into our communities. Rather than aiming for a veneer of politically correct “diversity” in a pluralistic world, he advocates for loving our actual neighbors, with a focus on the local and particular. “Without this, the common good is reduced to whatever is good for the greatest number of people.” The common good isn’t about an “average human,” but the actual human right in front of me.
In the second chapter, Peterman responds to a typical objection Christians may have to the common good: “Christians often veer far from the table because they fear gathering in this way might require them to compromise their beliefs.” He clarifies that a potluck is not a melting pot or blender creating “homogeneous muck,” but a place where unique dishes are enjoyed together. In fact, he says that the flavor of each food is nuanced and enhanced by the taste of the bites we take of other dishes. We do not need to be ashamed to share our “dish” with our neighbors. He reminds Christians that we have unique dishes to offer: love, goodness, and community. “God’s goodness is revealed in both what is shared and the very act of sharing.”
Next, the third chapter lists six practices of neighbor love: compassion, humility, translation, resonance, lamentation, and accompaniment. These practices form us into neighborly people. Because of the incarnation of Jesus, we can live incarnationally, embedded in the lives of our neighbors. He draws on a wide variety of sources for these practices, including James K.A. Smith and Asma Uddin to explore translation, Hartmut Rosa via Norman Wirzba for resonance, and Paul Farmer for accompaniment. Viewing these practices together, we see a posture of being other-focused and a willingness to sacrifice—the way of Jesus that Paul calls Christians to follow in Philippians 2 and elsewhere.
Chapter 4 is about building community. I found it interesting that Peterman focused on the building metaphor rather than a growing metaphor. (At the end of the book, he does refer to gardening and kintsugi metaphors to highlight hope, but the building metaphor is more extensive here.) Both building and gardening take a long time, but building highlights the human agency in the equation. Building also requires many diverse people working together.
In the final chapter, Peterman summarizes his argument for genuine care and neighborliness rooted in Christian impulses. This is where he most clearly refers to Jesus’s command to love God and neighbor, along with a reminder to be like the Samaritan neighbor from the parable. “I believe that the good life we all seek is found in loving and enjoying God and neighbor.”
At the end of the book, Peterman draws on John Inazu and Megan Johnson, two colleagues at Interfaith America, to summarize this posture of love. “The transformative work of neighbor love shifts our desire from ‘controlling’ a chaotic world to ‘living as neighbors’ in a world we can’t control.”
I especially appreciated that Peterman cited a mix of authors I am not familiar with along with those I know, such as Christian Wiman, Rubem A. Alves, Augustine, Andrew DeCort, Willie James Jennings, Søren Kierkegaard, Christine Pohl, and Charles Taylor. The first few chapters relied on Kevin W. Hector’s Christianity as a Way of Life. For such a short book, it includes a rich bibliography.
There’s a lot more this book could have been. It could have included more inspiring stories from Peterman’s work with Interfaith America. It could have provided more practical next steps. It could have given more details on current issues. But in a few pages, this book builds a framework and ignites our imaginations. Now we can continue the conversation in our local contexts. We can become neighbors by loving our actual neighbors and seeking their common good. That sounds a lot like what Jesus said.
Pete Ford
Pete Ford is a stay-at-home dad as well as a digital marketer for Christian publishers and nonprofits. By night, he is a reader, focusing on topics including nonviolence, time, the built environment, and spiritual practices like Sabbath.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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