Memoir Recalls 'My Fundamentalist Education'

Detail from the cover of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Childhood by Christine Rosen.

Christine Rosen's memoir of her elementary education is a clear-eyed, happy reminiscence of a world we're more accustomed to hearing about in polemics, pro and con. It's called My Fundamentalist Education.

Rosen spent the early 1980s in a Christian elementary school, reading the Bible, trying to convert the neighborhood kids, and observing mainstream American culture from behind an elaborate, protective curtain of religion.

Rosen is a historian who has written in the past about eugenics. In her memoir, she writes without anger or apology about ideas she has left behind — the ideas behind Keswick, her old school in St. Petersburg, Fla. Rosen discusses her fundamentalist education with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel.