Beyond Belief

""Jan Wojcik left the Jesuit order yet still became a holy father. In this charming memoir, refusing to weaponize fear as many books with religious themes, he finds different paths lead to God, even Beyond Belief. Along the way, he fishes, prays in colors, and sometimes dodges bullets. ""I wish I could have spent more time with him. Some of his passages resonated so deeply that I found myself returning to them over and over."" -Becky Hepinstall, coauthor of Sisters of Shiloh ""A candid and charming-often funny-memoir of a boy whose earthly sense of integrity compels him to become a Jesuit and, later, requires him to leave the order for the same reasons he joined it-to keep questioning the biblical literature about God, even as doing that might push him beyond belief. He can't stop anywhere along the line-or, in other words, he can't put a good book down. Neither could I his."" -James Ritts, software engineer ""I got to the end and was happy. It was just right for the story, funny and moving all the way through. A child grows to be a man, a Jesuit, a married man, building a valid philosophy out of what he thinks about what is happening to him. But then I was sad. There was no more story to read."" -Robert Hans Neiderer, carpenter, building arts teacher ""OMG the host down the cleavage episode had us in tears of laughter! Cradle Catholics would understand."" -Natalie and Ferd Leimkuhler, photographer and professor and chair emeritus of the School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University ""A memoir-thoughtful, reflective, sometimes self-incriminating, and honest-that reads almost leisurely, this often reads like a novel whose characters are complex, fully developed, and very real."" -Greg Fields, author of Through the Waters and the Wild, The Arc of the Comet, and The Bright Freight of Memory ""A man withdraws from the Society of Jesus where he had been in training for the priesthood-withdraws without pronouncement or denunciation, or resentment, and as it happens withdraws into the lovely arms of a woman with whom he has two children. ""Prevailing against resistance is a recurrent subtext of Beyond Belief. The author and his wife, both full-time teachers, also manage to cultivate an active and productive farm in the hard-scrabble soil of the very northern reaches of New York State, providing the community with produce, animal meat, and an extraordinary array of cut flowers. ""The trajectory of the author's massive journey finds a fitting resting place in the author's later years-as a fisher of students. And the reader will very likely endorse with great pleasure the arc of this life."" -Lee Perron, author of Pocket Poems and Celtic Light ""Jan Wojcik left the Jesuits we lived in together. But we've remained brothers and friends for almost fifty years. The question that shaped his life and vocation is as he says in the epilogue of Beyond Belief: 'What if God has a sense of humor?'"" -Joseph Appleyard, SJ, author of Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature and Becoming a Reader, Jesuit priest and professor emeritus at Boston College