Review
Title: The Founder of Our Peace: Christ-Centered Patterns for Easing Worry, Stress, and Fear
Author: John Hilton III
Publisher: Deseret Book
Genre: Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 186
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 978-1629727516
Price: 19.99
Reviewed by John Engler for the Association for Mormon Letters
Hilton had me at “patterns.” I binge on patterns—visual patterns, narrative patterns, athletic performance patterns, musical patterns, conceptual patterns—so when I saw Hilton’s book about patterns for peace, a now desperately needed commodity, I needed to know what Hilton was seeing. Hilton no doubt began working on this book well before the 2020 pandemic and election began siphoning away the peace from our lives, so he deserves a lot of credit, if not for being prescient, at least for being sensitive enough to the zeitgeist of vanishing peace long before it was quite so culturally palpable.
Of course, the longing for peace is nothing new. Hilton opens The Founder of Our Peace by listing ten instances of peacelessness from ancient scripture. Against the onslaught on peace, Hilton intends for this book to help “build a protective barrier to defend ourselves from these assaults.” He accomplishes this by linking up a wide variety of stories, observations, and insights in a way that points readers to Christ as “the founder of peace,” a phrase he credits to the Book of Mormon prophet, Abinidi. He asserts that the best way to build this defense and “find more peace in our lives is to deepen our relationship with [Jesus Christ].” Hilton stays true to his goal as he proceeds to unveil forty patterns of living, each of which, if applied, can lead to more peace.
While this was not meant to be an academic treatise pushing the fringes of behavioral theory, Hilton uses his capacity for scholarly complexity to produce a thorough treatment of peace-seeking approaches for everyday readers who long for a greater measure of peace in their lives. Instead of proposing programmatic efforts for societal peacebuilding, community conflict resolution, or international peace talks, Hilton invites readers to seek individual, inner peace through a personal relationship with Christ.
Hilton is a dynamic teacher and public speaker and is often featured on Book of Mormon Central’s YouTube channel with gospel insights, so he’s been around the church parking lot a few times. The writing in Founder of Our Peace is clean, tight, workmanlike, and admirably readable. In terms of style, this is not necessarily a book designed to invoke peace as reading a lyrical poem might or contemplating a piece of art or a sunset. Rather it’s designed to be a practical, how-to, daily-living approach to intentionally adopting patterns that scripture, science, and experience tell us result in more peace.
Some might argue that Hilton occasionally recycles a number of oft-repeated quotes and stories from LDS culture, like President Lorenzo Snow’s invitation seek out and help those worse off than us and the account of Pahoran not being offended, so there’s occasionally an impulse to dismiss some of the content as mere redux. He uses, for example, the Eisenhower Matrix (Urgent vs Non-urgent, Important vs Not Important) to invite readers to make intentional, prioritized choices. While the matrix itself isn’t exactly revolutionary (it was in vogue at least by the eighties), Hilton’s use of it as a tool for peace-seeking is a thoughtful application, as is his own adaptation of it for what he calls the Trust Matrix.
Hilton also includes a number of lesser-known scripture stories, like David and Michal, as well as modern-day originals, like the story of the woman who, when her brother committed suicide, felt guilty for having dismissed a prompting just months earlier to organize a family reunion. What’s particularly unique here is how this collection of wide-ranging content, including insights from popular culture and cognitive psychology journals, all carefully documented via endnotes, is brought together under the single umbrella of peace-seeking. If any one anecdote might seem a little musty, considering it in context with the rest of the book casts it in a new—and quite useful—light.
Frankly, the experience of reading the book was unexpected. Every few pages I found myself nodding in agreement with Hilton’s interpretation and analysis. During a number of sections, I even found myself getting a little emotional, probably no more than the time that Hilton recounts his final visit with a friend dying of cancer. It’s a tender retelling and put to good use to invite readers to keep an eternal perspective. The anecdotes in the book are brief, but well laid out and used in the service of his main objective. The book is organized with plenty of subheadings, efficiently described concepts, easy-to-understand diagrams, and a summary of patterns at the end of each chapter. This is Hilton wearing his well-used, dad-advice hat.
At one point right in the middle of a paragraph—it might have been during a Marie-Kondo-like section on decluttering—I impulsively set the book down and walked over to my laptop. Days earlier, I had decided to resign from a position I had quite enjoyed but that no longer fit into my long-term plans. I knew my departure would leave some people in limbo and that I would miss the friendships and the work, so I’d been procrastinating submitting my resignation. But in that moment, I typed the resignation and fired off the email.
When I came back to the book, I realized the effect it had had on me. In all sincerity, I felt a new, pleasant twinge of peace. The book had worked for me, though perhaps not quite in the way Hilton had intended. I hadn’t yet taken the chance to ponder the patterns or to deliberately make strides to apply them. I hadn’t yet reached the Conclusion where he’s laid out the forty patterns in convenient chart form for readers to take a personal peace inventory. And yet, the book had already worked for me in a much more organic way. I found myself craving the peace repeatedly described in the book to such a degree that my body just impulsively took action to claim it. For that, I’m grateful to Hilton.
To be precise, what Hilton identifies are primarily peace-inducing practices which, when repeated over time, become patterns. Some of these patterns have helped me think in new ways—seeking peace through my ancestors. Some patterns gave new terminology to patterns I’d experienced in my own life—“satisficing,” or the ability to be satisfied with a less-than-perfect-but-solidly-good option. Some patterns were expected—savor the moment. Many of the patterns drew on the teachings and example of Christ himself. In a number of cases, the patterns were identified from Hilton’s own first-hand experience—like a particularly difficult choice about his career, or the retelling of other people’s experiences—like his LDS friend Beth whose daughter announced she was gay. This is a bottomless well—even for the diligent, it will take a lifetime and then some to learn and consistently apply all forty of these patterns.
This book offers something for everyone who seeks peace. At the very least, Hilton’s expansive list of patterns will surely foster an appreciation for the breadth of ways peace can be sought and obtained; this is no one-way, single-track path, but a well-marked, multi-lane highway with many on-ramps. Hilton’s book is a welcome invitation to travel this road of inner peace by recognizing, understanding, and appreciating the patterns of living that the Savior exemplified and then being intentional about adopting those same patterns in our own lives. It’s a sure road to easing worry, stress, and fear, just as Hilton intended.