Faith based

Rosen, a straightforward and congenial narrator, guides us ably through her nine years as a student at Keswick Christian School in St. Petersburg, Florida. She offers a multitude of detailed portraits – most depicting a decidedly shabby environment. The wooden swings in the schoolyard "would leave splinters and flaking red paint on the back of your thighs." Attending Bible camp meant "a sweltering two-hour ride in the church van" and "swimming in an algae-covered lake." She has a particular knack for the humiliating detail. Keswick moms wore "vinyl mock-croc pumps and polyester-blend dresses from Sears." Visiting missionaries have "out-of-date clothes" and "badly cut hair." Affection and aversion seem to go everywhere hand in hand.

"I loved the Bible," she declares (and, indeed, she quotes from it frequently and at length). But she is troubled by discrepancies between Keswick's teachings and what she learns elsewhere. A class on evolution at the local science center leads to predictable confusion. What's surprising is that her parents sent her to such a class in the first place. But as we learn, in a rather sidelong fashion, Rosen's father and stepmother were not exactly religious fundamentalists, but were warm, loving and strangely unaware of the nature of Keswick's curriculum. Once they realised the extreme differences between the school and their family culture, they enrolled their children elsewhere. The epiphany did not occur, however, until Rosen was finishing junior high, and her parents realized the school banned activities like "dancing, and buying candy at the 7-11, and watching the occasional show on TV."

Dense with information about Rosen's personal experience, My Fundamentalist Education would have benefited from some historical, social and political context that might have helped us understand religious fundamentalism. But, bewilderingly, Rosen never really questions the discrepancies between her family's values and Keswick's. In the final chapter, she mentions that she is no longer a fundamentalist, without providing any explanation of how she came to this decision. Were she more reflective, her story might have had broader resonance.

Yet the book remains powerful on its own terms. "When reason and faith develop together... They are not so easily cast as opposites," Rosen observes. If this blurring is partly responsible for the frustrating omissions in her account, perhaps it is also what lets her perfectly capture the indiscriminate ways a child can hunger for explanations about the world.

LEAH HAGER COHEN

Leah Hager Cohen's most recent book is Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight

©2006 The New York Times

My fundamentalist education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood

By Christine Rosen

231 pp. PublicAffairs, €22