Usable Past

In A Usable Past? a twentieth-century Anabaptist ponders from the vantage point of 90 years his life story and learnings from his believers church odyssey. As he records, Peachey was shaped in the free church tradition and by his encounter with a traumatized post-World War II Europe. From that vantage point, he and Mennonite colleagues saw strengths in their heritage and developed concerns that their denomination’s focus on professionalization and institution building risked hiding the Anabaptist light under a bushel. This led to what came to be called the Concern movement, whose themes still resonate in Peachey’s quest to discern whether his life story offers “a usable past” able to offer fruitful perspectives on contemporary trends. During the second half of his career, much of that time as a Catholic University of America professor, Peachey worked at the interfaces between his believers church legacy and the “mainline” traditions of Christendom: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant.