August 26, 2025200 pages | ISBN 978-1-998408-23-8 “On November 16, 2023, the sixteen-year class-action lawsuit against Grenville Christian College finally came to a close. As a former student, 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 Feb. 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.”…
Read more
August 26, 2025
200 pages | ISBN 978-1-998408-23-8
“On November 16, 2023, the sixteen-year class-action lawsuit against Grenville Christian College finally came to a close. As a former student, 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 Feb. 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 of 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 experience of members including Rockefeller heiress Isabel Lincoln Elmer, Christian nationalist authors David Manuel and Peter Marshall Jr., American serviceman Aaron Bushnell and others. In Mothers of Invention, Whyte has composed a shocking work that seeks to honour the suffering of the children.
Advance Praise
“With elegant and searing prose, Whyte exposes the abuse that too often takes shelter in the name of religion. Poignant and shocking.” – Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
“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 M.D., author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
“Whyte writes with clarity, compassion and unwavering courage – his essays move between meticulous research and raw personal experience.” – Heidi von Palleske, actress and author of Two White Queens and the One-eyed Jack
About the Author
Ewan Whyte is a writer, 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 and Entrainment, a book of poetry, and 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.
