Spirits Eat Ripe Papaya
by Bill Svelmoe
Imprint: Resource Publications
Philip Andrews arrives on the mission field with outwardly impeccable credentials. He's a preacher's kid and a lifelong evangelical Protestant who has been recruited to teach the seventh and eighth grade children of missionaries in the Philippines. What none of the missionaries who welcome him to Ilusan know is that he's also been expelled from Bible college for his relationship with the daughter of a prominent evangelist. Despite his shoulder-length hair, which causes him to be mistaken for both a woman and Jesus before he's been at the mission center for twenty-four hours, Philip's easy-going charm and skill at speaking "evangelicalese" soon win him a following, especially among the school children. But is Philip a bad seed, a wolf in sheep's clothing? Or is he an earnest seeker simply trying to find his way? Before this hilarious novel, which one evangelical literary agent said would never be published, reaches its shocking conclusion, every missionary at Ilusan and Philip himself will have to answer that question.
Bill Svelmoe is associate professor of history at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He grew up in the Philippines where his parents were evangelical Protestant missionaries on Mindanao Island. He is the author of A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith Missions, 1896-1945.
"Bill Svelmoe's novel Spirits Eat Fresh Papaya is a funny, bittersweet, perceptive, and-yes-tender glimpse into the world of the all-too human 'saints' who inhabit the far-flung outposts of the American evangelical subculture's foreign missions corps."
--Larry Eskridge
Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals
Wheaton College
"Bill Svelmoe provides a good-natured and sensitive portrayal of the experience, so common in a pluralistic world, of finding that one no longer fully belongs to one's birthright community. That experience is especially poignant in a tight-knit fundamentalistic evangelical community on an intriguing tropical missionary compound. Svelmoe skillfully depicts how such a community can be genuinely attractive, warm-hearted, and embracing, and yet have hard edges that can be psychologically fatal."
--George Marsden
author of Fundamentalism and American Culture.
"Svelmoe's Philip Andrews is one of the most memorable and authentic characters to emerge in recent Christian fiction, inviting the reader to follow the hilarious and moving struggle to fit his questioning faith into the rigid forms of missionary school piety."
--Leonard J. Vander Zee
author of Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper
"[Svelmoe's] story is poignant, compelling, and timely. Ostensibly, it tells the quirky tale of a young missionary stationed on a jungle compound in the Philippines; but really, it is an incisive (and at times indicting) commentary on the life-giving freedoms and spirit-draining foibles of the evangelical subculture, written by an insider who has experienced both extremes."
--Debra Dochuk
former assistant director of the PEW Evangelical Scholars Program
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