Spirits Eat Ripe Papaya [Hardcover]

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'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 andlS!