1. John Cornwell begins with an epigraph from seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw, who describes a picture of St. Thérèse of Avila in “The Flaming Heart.” How does this quotation play out in the memoir? Does it match your understanding of suffering?

2. How would you characterize Cornwell’s memories of his father? Who were his more loving father figures? Who were the most damaging ones?

3. The early chapters of Seminary Boy describe the many ways in which Hitler’s bombings devastated the lives of ordinary British civilians. How did these events affect the psyche of Cornwell’s family members? What tone is set by this time period?

4. Discuss the unique structure of the book. What was the effect of reading Cornwell’s narrative in a series of more than one hundred precise scenes? What changes are reflected in the division of four parts?

5. What does Seminary Boy indicate about the formation of faith? What is your opinion of religious indoctrination, both in general and as it was experienced by Cornwell? How were your own beliefs about spirituality formed?

6. In chapter eight, Cornwell recalls the day a rocket struck an Anglican church, killing most of the congregation. He was told that this was God’s way of punishing Protestants. In subsequent chapters, he writes of the numerous Catholics who were brutally executed for their allegiance to the Pope. In what way does Britain’s religious history shape this memoir? How did this history shape Cornwell’s identity?

7. In chapter thirteen, Cornwell describes being molested in London, an experience that understandably marked a transformation in him. What did role did religion play in his life in the months after this incident? How did he perceive himself after the assault?

8. Discuss the pivotal women Cornwell describes. How does his attitude toward his mother change throughout the memoir? What is the source of her controlling power? What does he learn from Nurse Philomena, who rejects him in chapter seventy-seven?

9. How did economics and class influence Cornwell’s sense of self? What did it mean for him to lose his cockney speech style, or to take note of his mother’s malapropisms? How did it affect him to arrive at Cotton without the luxuries so easily afforded by the other students? After reading of his near-fatal illness, how did you reconcile his mother’s eagerness to commit him to a summer of heavy physical labor and the seminary’s determination that he needed an extended period of rest?

10. How did you react to the sexual repression described throughout Seminary Boy? How was Cornwell taught to define sexual immorality? How do you define it? Did this memoir change your understanding of recent scandals regarding pedophile priests?

11. In chapter forty-five, Cornwell is intrigued to witness clergy in disagreement with each other. Discuss the range of approaches presented by the various priests in Cornwell’s memoir, from his neighborhood’s Father Cooney to the boisterous Father Armishaw and the austere Father Doran. Who were his ultimate role models for living a devout life?

12. What accounts for the way Cornwell abandons the priesthood, as described in the book’s postscript? Why was he unable to walk away from seminary life sooner? While many of his peers went on to become lifelong priests, Cornwell eventually not only questioned but exposed corrupt religious authorities through his writing. What accounts for these two distinctly different paths?

13. In his postscript, Cornwell also describes reading Paradise Lost and The Origin of Species at Christ’s College, Cambridge: “The underlying tension between these two versions of reality, I realized, had been forcing me into a kind of intellectual schizophrenia.” How would you address chasms between perceptions of the supernatural and the scientific?

14. Contemporary memoirs encompass a broad range of experiences, but they often feature the resolution of trauma. In what way do the revelations in Seminary Boy underscore the healing themes in other memoirs you have read? In what way is Seminary Boy unlike any memoir you have read?

15. Cornwell describes the dilapidated state of the seminary when he visited it years later. What cultural losses are represented in the demise of schools like his minor seminary? What has been gained and lost in the post-Vatican II world? What would have become of Cornwell without Cotton College?