I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth - Hardcover

Peterson, Brenda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0306818043 ISBN 13: 9780306818042

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2010

Synopsis

In Brenda Peterson's unusual memoir, fundamentalism meets deep ecology. The author's childhood in the high Sierra with her forest ranger father led her to embrace the entire natural world, while her Southern Baptist relatives prepared eagerly and busily to leave this world. Peterson survived fierce “sword drill” competitions demanding total recall of the Scriptures and awkward dinner table questions (“Will Rapture take the cat, too?”) only to find that environmentalists with prophecies of doom can also be Endtimers. Peterson paints such a hilarious, loving portrait of each world that the reader, too, may want to be Left Behind.

About this title

About the Author

Brenda Peterson is the author of several novels including Duck and Cover, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in Seattle.

Reviews

Talk of the rapture—the ascent to heaven of true Christians before the end of the world—surrounds Peterson (Duck and Cover), and she engages this conversation with delicacy, humor, frustration, and, at times, a begrudging respect, in this memoir about growing up among Southern Baptists and not quite fitting in. Peterson's story is told through what is really a series of vignettes, tied together by two themes, faith and the environment. She looks back at her childhood, college, and then adulthood, stopping here and there, selecting scenes from her life that show why she finds God outdoors, and why the rapture-obsessed family and community of her youth quickly loses its appeal. Her love for this world and everything in it is far greater than any promise of salvation apart from and above it. Readers interested in a story about leaving behind theologically conservative Christianity and other types of extremism will find Peterson's collection of anecdotes and remembered conversations engaging. The chapters can be read on their own, and her prologue, The Trumpet Shall Sound, and chapter In the Garden are among the best. (Feb.)
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*Starred Review* Peterson has been sharpening her ethos on the flinty tenets of the Southern Baptist Church ever since she was an inquisitive child enthralled by the living world. Following her fourth novel, Animal Heart (2004), she continues the inquiry into her complex heritage and ecological calling that she began in Build Me an Ark (2001). In this unusually affecting and radiant spiritual memoir, Peterson recounts her resistance to End Times teachings. Surely, life on earth is sacred, thought this “increasingly mutinous mystic” alert to the contradictions between her parents’ heaven-focused religion and her CIA-employed mother’s earthiness and her gifted father’s devotion to nature as chief of the U.S. Forest Service. With stirring immediacy, Peterson describes the traumatic awakenings during the 1960s and 1970s that inspired her to reject the concept of the Rapture and embrace the effort to preserve earthly creation. Guided by exceptional mentors, Peterson endured experiences painful, ludicrous, and profound in small towns, a “boot camp for Southern Baptists,” and the offices of the New Yorker before finding her true home on the Pacific coast. Frankly and knowledgeably critiquing evangelicalism and holier-than-thou environmentalism, Peterson seeks a meeting of church and earth in this witty, enrapturing account of a spiritual journey of great relevance to us all. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306818043
• ISBN 13: 9780306818042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288