The New Yorker:

After my mother’s death, my father plunged the family into evangelicalism, leaving our Jewish faith behind. What, I wondered, would become of our souls?

By Rachel Louise Snyder 

In the revival tent, I could feel the perspiration gathering along my hairline, streaming down my temples. The adults around me sang, their bodies swaying. They blocked a full view of the stage, but I saw glimpses of people in prone positions or falling under the influence of God, caught by big-shouldered ushers sweating through their suits. Speaker stacks blared what some of us might now call slow jams, while a minister—sometimes my uncle Jim, sometimes a guest pastor—prayed for diseases to be healed, for sadness and pain to be lifted, for debt to disappear. As people fell, others would rise, dazed and blinking into the stage lights.

Jim and my aunt Janet had invited us to this family camp—a revival, they called it—on the grounds of a former motel in northern Illinois. My father, my brother David, and I made the trip from our home in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, driving hours across the endless cornfields of Ohio and Indiana. My mother had died two years before, of breast cancer, and I imagine that Janet, my father’s older sister, was a balm to him in his grief. But I also knew that we’d have never gone had my mom still been alive.

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