My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood by Christine Rosen

A touching, funny memoir of growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, in a household, school, and town of flourishing Biblical literalism

When Christine Rosen started kindergarten, her ABCs included the Apocalypse, the Bible, and Christ. At Keswick Christian School "the Bible was our textbook," God the guide, and after entering the school gates, nothing was ever quite the same again. Christine learned creation science, dreamed of becoming a missionary to exotic countries, worried about the souls of Jews and Mormons, and experienced unusual methods of sex education. With the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of atheistic Russians looming, she also frequently prayed for rapture.

At home, Florida life seemed happily to confirm several literal truths: the story of Moses, with its plagues that afflicted the Egyptians-from lice, to rivers of stinking dead fish, to hordes of frogs-might have been describing Christine's back yard.

My Fundamentalist Education is a brilliant, affectionate, child's-eye journey to Rosen's home, school and small town. Set in a time and place when the Living Bible outsold The Joy of Sex, during a girlhood lived as the Lord intended, among the tropical flora and fauna of Florida, its televangelists, irascible elderly, and itinerant preachers, Christine Rosen and her sister, Cathy, uncover the not always godly but surely divine secrets of a Hallelujah-ya sisterhood.

About the Author
Christine Rosen is the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement and a fellow of the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She has a Ph.D. in History from Emory University, and her opinion pieces and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Weekly Standard, Commentary, New England Journal of Medicine, and other publications. She is also a frequent contributor to radio and television shows. She lives in Washington, D.C. and is married to Jeffrey Rosen.