It’s November, and I am forty-seven, a newly single mother, driving home to North Carolina from a conference in Pittsburgh, where I spoke with other women writers on a panel called “A Wilderness of Her Own.” It’s drizzling in West Virginia, and I’m gazing at the fog and branches around me almost to my peril…

End times? Friends in the evangelical world talk seriously about the Rapture. Our world is in turmoil, and the social and political structures we have trusted seem to be coming undone. This is not the first time I have experienced so unsettling a change in the fabric of my universe. In my childhood, I lived…