I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here On Earth

I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here On Earth /
Brenda Peterson



*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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
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