Mothers of Invention: Essays on the Community of Jesus and Grenville Christian College

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Ewan Whyte

Mothers of Invention

Essays on the Community of Jesus and Grenville Christian College

Ewan Whyte

$44.95

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Wolsak & Wynn Publishers
24 June 2025

Memoirs; True crime; Contemporary non-Christian & para-Christian cults & sects; Hoaxes & deceptions

“On Nov. 16, 2023, the sixteen-year class-action lawsuit against Grenville Christian College came to a close. As a former student of Grenville, with a forced childhood in its close affiliate, the Community of Jesus, I could hardly believe it.”

Though the school closed in 2007, it was only in 2019 that the lawsuit of roughly 1,350 students finally went to trial. On February 23, 2020, Justice Janet Leiper issued her decision concluding that “the evidence of maltreatment and the varieties of abuse perpetrated on students’ bodies and minds in the name of the COJ [Community of Jesus] values of submission and obedience was class-wide and decades-wide.” In these meticulously documented, yet personal essays Ewan Whyte examines the extraordinary history of Grenville and the Community of Jesus, the charismatic Massachusetts-based “church” with close financial and spiritual ties to Grenville, and his own experiences within the school. Drawing on extensive research, he details the experiences of members including Rockefeller heiress Isabel Lincoln Elmer, Christian nationalist authors David Manuel and Peter Marshall Jr. and American serviceman Aaron Bushnell. In Mothers of Invention, Whyte has composed a shocking work that seeks to honour the suffering of the children.

By: Ewan Whyte
Imprint: Wolsak & Wynn Publishers
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 8mm
Weight: 325g
ISBN: 9781998408238
ISBN 10: 199840823X
Pages: 225
Publication Date: 24 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Ewan Whyte is a writer, and art and cultural critic. He has written for the Globe & Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. He is the author of Desire Lines: Essays on Art, Poetry & Culture; Shifting Paradigms: Essays on Art and Culture; Entrainment, a book of poetry; and Catullus, a translation of the rude ancient Roman poet Catullus. His feature essay “The Cult that Raised Me” on the U.S.-based Community of Jesus/Grenville Christian College cult was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.

Reviews for Mothers of Invention: Essays on the Community of Jesus and Grenville Christian College

""A long sequence of satisfying and enticing portrait poems: Fioretti, who renounces worldly possessions for ecstatic joy, a bawdy Catullus translation, and a self-portrait titled ""Bike Accident Poem."" Each of these reveals something sly and delicious about the character on which it focuses. . . . Entrainment is a strong debut capable of echoing old masters."" - Micheline Maylor - Quill & Quire ""As Ewan Whyte's dramatic personal history exemplifies, some of the most shocking accounts of systematic child abuse have emerged from institutions administered in the name of religion and compassion. Too often they have been met by disbelief or denial. The impacts for future mental and physical health can be devastating."" - Gabor Maté ""Powerful and eloquent - and deeply upsetting, especially to a reader who thinks often of these issues and the cosmic injustice of perpetrators' dying, old, in their beds."" - Steven Heighton ""With elegant and searing prose, Whyte exposes the abuse that too often takes shelter in the name of religion. Poignant and shocking."" - Katherine Stewart