GOMES, Peter J(ohn) 1942-

PERSONAL: Born May 22, 1942, in Boston, MA; son of Peter Lobo (an agricultural worker) and Orissa Josephine (a civil servant; maiden name, White) Gomes. Education: Bates College, B.A., 1965; Harvard University, S.T.B., 1968. Politics: Republican. Religion: Baptist. Hobbies and other interests: Music, antiques, cigars.

ADDRESSES: Home—Sparks House, 21 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138-2001. Office—Memorial Church, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

CAREER: Minister, historian, church musician, and author. Ordained Baptist minister, 1968; Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, AL, instructor of history and director of freshman experimental program, 1968-70; Memorial Church, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant minister to acting minister, 1970-74, minister, 1974—, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, 1974—, W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American History, acting director, 1990—. Visiting professor, Duke University, 1993-94. National chaplain, American Guild of Organists, 1978-82. Director of the English-Speaking Union; trustee of the Pilgrim Society, Donation to Liberia, 1973—, Bates College, 1973-78, 1980—, Charity of Edward Hopkins, 1974—, Boston Freedom Trail, 1976—, Plymouth Plantation, 1977—, Roxbury Latin School, 1982—, Wellesley College, 1985—, Boston Foundation, 1985—, Plymouth Public Library, 1985—, Handel and Haydn Society, and the International Fund for Defense and Aid in South Africa (and president), 1977—. Member of the Farmington Institute of Christian Studies.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Arts (fellow), Royal Society of Church Music, American Baptist Historical Society, Unitarian Historical Society, Country Day School Headmasters Association (honorary), Signet Society (president), Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Historical Society, Harvard Musical Association (president), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Rockefeller Fellow, 1967-68; Pilgrim Society award for history, 1970; D.D. (hon.), New England College, 1974, University of the South, 1989, and Bates University, 1997; L.H.D., Waynesburg College, 1978, Duke University, 1997, and University of Nebraska, 1997; Hum.D., Gordon College, 1985; Litt.D., Knox College, 1987; fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.

WRITINGS:

(With Lawrence D. Geller), The Books of the Pilgrims, Garland (New York, NY), 1975.

(And editor) History of Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

Proclamation Series, Lent, 1995.

The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, Morrow (New York, NY), 1996.

Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living, Morrow (New York, NY), 1998.

The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2002.

Editor of History of the Pilgrim Society, 1970. Author of Proclamation Series Commentaries, Lent, 1985. Author of introduction to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass, Signet Classic (New York, NY), 1997, and The Courage to Be, by Paul Tillich, second edition, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2000. Editor, Parnassus, 1970; member of editorial board, Pulpit Digest.

SIDELIGHTS: After ministering to the congregation of Harvard University's Memorial Church for more than twenty years, Peter J. Gomes stepped into controversy in late 1991 when he challenged a student magazine's anti-homosexual propaganda in a speech, during which he declared himself gay. "Gay people are victims not of the Bible, not of religion, and not of the church, but of people who use religion as a way to devalue and deform those whom they can neither ignore nor convert," he told the crowd of hundreds, as quoted by Robert S. Boynton in the New Yorker.

Gomes, a conservative, Republican, African-American clergyman who had delivered the benediction at Ronald Reagan's second presidential inauguration and the sermon at George H. Bush's inauguration, quickly found himself hailed by progressive elements on campus—some of whom left notes and flowers at the church door—and vilified by reactionaries who called for his resignation. National magazines and television news programs picked up the story. Concerning his new celebrity, Gomes told Boynton: "I don't like being the main exhibit, but this was an unusual set of circumstances, in that I felt I had a particular resource that nobody else there possessed." With a personal dislike for such terms as "gay activist" and "homosexual chaplain," Gomes bracketed for possible deletion in the printed text of his speech the phrase in which he referred to himself as "a Christian who happens as well to be gay." Nevertheless, after giving the full speech, he asserted confidently to the New Yorker, "I have no regrets."

Gomes has been an ardent individualist all his life, with a style, however, that has enabled him to fit into the most exalted institutional circles of the Ivy League: he collects antiques, throws exquisite dinner parties, smokes expensive cigars, and dresses like a model of patrician good taste. He grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the son of a highly intelligent father who was a farm laborer, and a mother who, as a descendant of Boston's black aristocracy, was the first African-American woman to work in the Massachusetts State House as a clerk, as well as being organist and choir director for a predominately white church. As the only child of late-marrying parents, Gomes grew up in a nurturing environment and was exposed to literature, the arts, and science from an early age. Educated mainly in the company of white children, he was often selected by them as class president and was noted for his activities in school (and later, college) organizations.

Gomes loved to play church as a boy, giving sermons in emulation of the pastor of his family's church. As he would later tell Boynton, "Church for me was what the basketball court is to most black kids: a place where my imagination was unleashed and I was given free reign on a stage." After studying history at Bates College in Maine, he was persuaded by a religion professor there to experience the intellectual stimulation offered at Harvard Divinity School. Upon being ordained, Gomes took a teaching position at traditionally black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where, by his own admission, "I saw more black people in my first half hour . . . than I had ever seen in my entire life."

The conservatively dressed, New England-accented Gomes became a favorite of Tuskegee's students. Two years later, he successfully embraced the opportunity to become a favorite at Harvard, an institution he regards as having, historically, a civilizing moral obligation toward society. At Harvard, where by virtue of his benedictions and commencement speeches he is, according to Boynton, "the first and last official voice that every Harvard student hears," Gomes gained a reputation as a stirring, memorable orator who combined the mellifluous verbal play of African-American preachers with the rigorous rhetoric of a New England intellectual. Nobel Prize-winning poet and Harvard professor Seamus Heaney, describing Gomes's oratory, told Boynton: "He embraces this old-fashioned grandiloquent style in a manner that is always on the edge of carnival....His style is full of cadence, roguery, and scampishness, which is itself redemptive."

An energetic worker and a much sought-after member of organizations, Gomes—who told Boynton that he has never had a gay partner and expected never to have one—professes himself relatively unexposed to what mainstream America perceives as the gay community. Nevertheless, his position as a well-placed clergyman who had come out lent special weight to his 1996 book, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart. In this volume, Gomes attempts to refute the literalism, culturalism, and, in his words "bibliolatry" of right-wing fundamentalists who use selected passages from the Bible to inveigh against homosexuality, abortion, and the science of evolution. Gomes's work is intended to be a readable introduction to the Bible for general readers who may have regretted their comparative ignorance of that source of moral and spiritual guidance. "People have a hunger and look to the bible for answers that they can't find elsewhere. And that is a problem," Gomes told Boynton. He explained, "They attribute to the Bible a kind of functional credibility that it was never designed to have. They idolize it."

The Good Book is organized into three parts. In the first, Gomes discusses the Bible's background, its composition, and related basic issues. In the second part, he deals with twelve specific contemporary public issues on which the Bible's words had been used as ammunition; these include wealth, race, and the equality of women, as well as homosexuality and other issues. The third part is titled "The True and Lively Word"; Washington Post Book World contributor Diana L. Hayes, a theologian from Georgetown University, found this section to be where "Gomes's creativity is fully revealed." Here, he argues for the individual's use of "moral imagination" in evaluating issues with the help of Biblical scripture. The book at this point "invites the reader . . . into an unending dialogue with God's word as interpreted by humanity," said Hayes. Presbyterian minister and philosopher John C. S. Kim, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book review, also welcomed Gomes's work, calling it "a noble, though sometimes ambivalent, attempt to suggest how one can live by God's law in a complicated, secular age." John Moryl of Yeshiva University, commenting on The Good Book for Library Journal, thought that Gomes succeeded in reaching readers with his "honest, down-to-earth, personal, and thoughtful" approach and added that the book was "not preachy, pietistic, or fundamentalist." Lord Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, remarked, as quoted by Boynton, that Gomes's opus was "easily the best contemporary book on the Bible for thoughtful people." Gomes himself greeted the critical and financial success of his book—which had earned a three hundred thousand dollar advance—with equanimity, thus perhaps adding another unusual aspect to his own self-characterization: "The oddest thing about being an oddity is that there are very few oddities like you," he told Boynton.

Gomes followed the success of The Good Book with The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need, which seeks to convince readers that happiness in life cannot be obtained through material possessions or career accomplishments but rather is found by the pursuit of more noble purposes. He was inspired to write the book after observing that many of the students at Harvard were redefining what they wanted in life. Rather than viewing college as a place to obtain a degree with the purpose of getting a high-paying job, they instead want to gain personal satisfaction by living more moral lives. As a conservative, Gomes feels that some of the answers to the questions posed by today's generation can be found in the Western tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato. It is a tradition, he asserts, that has been largely lost in America because of ignorance and cultural plurality; however, one must not simply look to the past for answers but instead should use the wisdom passed down to us to help build the future. The Good Life, Richard Higgins further explained in Christian Century, "dissects the 'plausible lies' of our materialistic culture and argues that we need to revivify the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude and the great theological virtues of faith, hope and love." "Gomes," added Christian Century contributor Jennifer E. Copeland, "defines success as 'doing something that is worth doing.' This is not groundbreaking news but, rather, a confirmation that good living takes a lot of hard work." A Library Journal critic concluded that with its "clear thinking and writing" The Good Life "promises to be another best seller." And Booklist reviewer June Sawyers wrote that "in writing about things that matter, [Gomes] has written a book that matters."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 1996, p. 296; April 15, 1998, Ray Olson, review of Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living, p. 1397; March 15, 2002, June Sawyers, review of The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need, p. 1187.

Christian Century, May 22, 2002, Jennifer E. Copeland, "Tools for Life," p. 18, and Richard Higgins, "Polishing the Truth," p. 19.

Christianity Today, April 7, 1997, p. 42.

Harvard Business Review, September, 2001, David A Light, "Is Success a Sin?," p. 63.

Hudson Review, winter, 1998, Bruce Bawer, review of The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, p. 691.

Library Journal, December 1996, John Moryl, review of The Good Book, pp. 99-100; May 1, 1998, Bernandette McGrath, review of Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living, p. 106; May 15, 2002, John Moryl, review of The Good Life, p. 102.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 5, 1997, John C. S. Kim, review of The Good Book, p. 8.

New Yorker, November 11, 1996, Robert S. Boynton, pp. 64-73.

People, March 3, 1997, p. 65.

Publishers Weekly, September 16, 1996, p. 66.

Time, January 27, 1997, p. 77.

Washington Post Book World, March 23, 1997, Diana L. Hayes, review of The Good Book, p. 7.*