After the Mountain

“The forest evolves, grows, survives. So will you.”

Griffin Oleynick was 28 when he moved into a thousand-year-old monastery on a mountain in Italy to become a monk. He had spent years preparing: his faith kindled over Dante in graduate school, seasons of prayer and discernment, a growing certainty that God was calling him to Camaldoli—to a life of poverty, scholarship, and silence in a forest at the edge of the world. For a time, it was everything he had hoped.

Then his novice master began to groom him for abuse.

After the Mountain is a rare firsthand account of clerical abuse of a vulnerable adult. But more than that, it’s a story of falling in love with God—and what it means to rage against, and persist in, faith. It’s a book for anyone who has been betrayed by an institution they believed in, anyone who has had their faith shattered but cannot quite let go of God, anyone who suspects that—despite everything—the world is charged with grace.

A spiritual memoir for our moment. A love story for all time.