A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Memoir of Pentecostal childhood, tongues, loss of belief, family and class tensions, research in Nigeria, and later family reconciliation.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It treats religious change as an embodied relational loss rather than an argument someone simply wins. The memoir offers recognition to travelers whose intellectual shifts remain entangled with love, memory, language, and belonging.
Good starting place if…
You want a compassionate first-person account of leaving a Pentecostal faith, including tongues, certainty, family bonds, education, grief, and the life that continues after belief changes.
Know before you begin…
Wilbanks narrates one white American family's Pentecostal world and her own movement away from it; the memoir is not an assessment of all Pentecostalism or a universal deconversion sequence. Readers with similar histories may find parts emotionally close.