Mothers of Invention

"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.