OUT OF ORDER

Rob Donnelly entered a contemplative Catholic monastery in his early twenties. He stayed for nearly a decade. Then, in a break that surprised those around him, he left.

Out of Order is a spare, unsentimental memoir of a young man's search for belonging inside the walls of a religious order-and what happens when the voice that once led him to surrender begins to fall silent. With clarity and psychological precision, Donnelly traces the slow work of disillusionment, the disintegration of certa...