Overview

An Ex-Jesuit Makes Peace with the Past A memoir telling how the author's choices were influenced by his father's addiction. Ronald attends a Jesuit high school in Buffalo, New York at the same time his father is recovering from alcoholism. But Ronald's mother, unable to forgive her husband for his past mistreatment of her, fosters in her son a need to make up to her for his father's sins and so delays the separation from her necessary to his growing up. He enters the Jesuit order at seventeen, his father dies of cancer shortly afterward, and nine lonely years later he leaves the Jesuits having discovered under their tutelage that he was not one of them. His marriage, his children, his career teaching literature, and the writing of this memoir all teach him mercy, especially to his body, and help him bridge the gap between his appreciation of the Jesuits and the necessity he felt to leave them behind. About the author: Ronald C. Wendling The son of a heating salesman and a bookkeeper, Ronald Wendling grew up in Buffalo, New York and attended a Jesuit high school there. He spent the late nineteen fifties and early sixties as a Jesuit seminarian but left the order before being ordained to the Catholic priesthood. After a brief teaching stint at Saint Joseph's, a Jesuit University in Philadelphia, Ronald married, earned his Ph.D. in English Literature, and returned to Saint Joseph's, where he taught English until his retirement in 2006. He has written extensively about the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and is the author of a previous book on Coleridge's religious philosophy. Ronald and his wife of nearly fifty years reside just outside Philadelphia and feel fortunate to have their two married daughters living close by. They spend their summers on Page Lake in the Endless Mountains of Northeast Pennsylvania.

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9781610091640

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