The year is 1962 and young Weldon Thatcher is coerced by his mother and the local preacher into attending Edenfield College, a Protestant icon and a place straightaway paranoid about influences from the outside world. Though Weldon is fashioned from a childhood of perfect Sunday school attendance, he brings to Edenfield a determined curiosity to know what lies beyond the boundaries of God’s moral code and the stuff of religion. Wresting and exacting, Edenfield is an all-embracing, coming-of-age account of a young man in transition and caught up in the most intricate aspects of faith-based academia, one rooted in the narrowed tenets of fundamentalism: from classroom to dorm room, from prayer meeting to revival meeting, from spirituality to sacrilege, from lust to love—its effects holding sway even after thirty years and well beyond what Weldon thought was his last goodbye. Insightful and forthcoming, Edenfield dares a glimpse into the influences of a denominational institution and those with the conviction of a higher power; a firsthand look at what rails within its walls: what rankles and what inspires, what causes us to seethe and what begs for our forgiveness; what shakes us to the core of our funny bone, and what shamefully fastens itself to those most unsuspecting.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

George Justice holds a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing. He has been published five times for short stories, three times for poetry, and was a longtime movie critic for Michigan’s Oakland County Daily Tribune. During his enlistment with the U.S. Army, he wrote numerous articles (from human interest to military) for Stars and Stripes. While at the University of Detroit, he was “one-of-twelve” chosen from a field of over 300 for a semester-long advanced creative writing symposium conducted by then writer-in-residence, John Gardner. His first novel Greezy Creek was published in September 2019.