“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.

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.

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