Rudy and Shirley Nelson have spent most of their professional lives as writers and teachers, but a few years ago they made an unforgettable documentary film called Precarious Peace: God and Guatemala. This film is truly exemplary: one of the most balanced and sane explorations of the way that religion has factored into the efforts to overcome violence, poverty, and oppression in this troubled country. Alas, it is a film with continuing relevance. We can’t resist adding a lighter note here: the Nelsons also started out their careers by working on a film—it was called The Blob. The 1958 version. But there is nothing amorphous about the Nelsons: whether collectively or individually, they write with a paradoxical but persuasive mixture of faith and clear-eyed skepticism. Just read Shirley’s Fair, Clear, and Terrible, a harrowing account of a cult-like religious community. Or Rudy’s study of the controversial and troubled former head of Fuller Seminary, Edward Carnell, whose ideas stirred both passion and protest at a time when evangelicalism was changing in America.
Some of the Nelsons’ work is featured in Image issue 44.
Biography
Rudy and Shirley Nelson began their writing careers in radio and films. Both taught for ten years at Barrington College in Rhode Island as they raised their family, Rudy as chair of the English Department and Shirley as mentor to creative writing students. Rudy, after earning a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University in 1971, joined the faculty of the University at Albany, retiring as Associate Professor of English and Religious Studies in 1994. He is the author of The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Shirley earned her Masters Degree in English from the University at Albany following the publication of her novel, The Last Year of the War, by Harper and Row in 1978, winning the Harper Saxton Fellowship. Her second book, Fair Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine, a narrative history of an apocalyptic community where her parents grew up, was published by British American in 1989. Both books are being re-issued by Wipf and Stock Publishers. As a free-lance writer, she has published short stories, poetry, reviews and essays in a variety of journals and anthologies.
In a recent return to the film genre, the Nelsons co-produced the documentary Precarious Peace: God and Guatemala, which Image editor Gregory Wolfe, in his on-line review, called “a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking.” The DVD, completed in 2003, with funding by The United States Institute of Peace, is being distributed nationally by Vision Video and Maryknoll Productions.
“All our work is collaborative, in one way or another,” the Nelsons say, with lots of in-put from imaginative and reliable resources. For instance, Precarious Peace was co-directed by Dennis Smith, a mission co-worker (PCUSA) and communications specialist in Guatemala. The present video is being co-produced by filmmaker James Ault, creator of the award-winning documentary Born Again. The Nelson’s books and other writing have been sometimes co-written, but are always subject, in their own words, to each other’s “toughest, meanest, and totally devastating criticism.”
Current Projects
September 2006
“No matter what writing projects we attempt, we seem to end up headlong in the chaotic mix of art and social concerns, and a struggle to keep the integrity of each without mutual destruction. Right now this engagement is taking place in two projects, the onset of a new documentary and the completion of a novel. The novel takes place in Central America in sensitive historical circumstances, tensions that require a special poetry of their own to be both factually and fictionally viable. The video tangles with the problems and opportunity facing North American churches with the rapid increase of cultural and ethnic diversity. The DVD is sponsored by Hartford Seminary, with start-up funds from the Louisville Institute.”