Sisters author explores world of Jefferson

Award-winning Sisters author Larry Len Peterson will give a talk on the world of Thomas Jefferson from his book "American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, And The Spirit Of The West" at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 3, at the Fireside Room at Sisters Community Church. The public is welcome.

Pastor Steve Stratos plans to host talks by different individuals once a month in a public forum to discuss cultural issues that affect the citizens of Sisters.

"He wants to have an open discussion on topics that are of interest to the entire community," Peterson told The Nugget.

Peterson said that he will talk about Jefferson - primary author of the Declaration of Independence, philosopher, architect, inventor, natural scientist and the third president of the United States.

"Many of the problems that he had to address, we address today," Peterson said.

Those persistent problems include matters of religious freedom and race relations.

Jefferson was unquestionably brilliant - as Peterson asserts, "the most brilliant person, maybe, in American history" - but he is a controversial figure today (indeed, he was controversial in his own time). He was a tangle of contradictions. He asserted in the Declaration that "we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." and yet he was a life-long slave owner, who almost certainly had a sexual relationship with his slave, a teenaged Sally Hemings.

"He saw America as a land of white families," Peterson notes.

He was an avatar of the Enlightenment - where, as Peterson notes, "everything had to be provable" - and yet he championed religious freedom. In fact the religious landscape of modern America could not exist without his groundwork.

"If it wasn't for Jefferson, there wouldn't be any Baptists or Methodists or anything like that," Peterson said.

Peterson says that modern Americans operate under many misconceptions and myths about the nature and origins of religious freedom in early America - myths he hopes to clear up in his talk.

That talk will be participatory.

"My hope would be that we could have a discussion," Peterson said.

Peterson will draw from his magnum opus for the talk.

"American Trinity" is a challenging, 600-page book, employing history, science, philosophy and theology in an in-depth exploration of the fraught history of race relations between European-Americans and native peoples.

In its year-end Best of the West collectors edition for 2017, True West Magazine rated Peterson Best Author, and "American Trinity" as non-fiction book of the year.

Sisters Community Church is located at 1300 McKenzie Hwy. in Sisters.