"... for those spirit/truth seeking friends who long ago stopped trusting anything from a pulpit."

~ Father Joe's daily journals

The Crucible

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The story begins like the parable it’s become, in a no-man’s land with the seed of dreams strewn in the most foolish of places: slum rubbish. This was the 1970s when few people believed anything good could grow from the backwater of the undeveloped world. There were no official addresses or property deeds in the cordoned-off corners of Bangkok, nothing much for the municipal books, just putrid ground so primal and bleak that land was free for the staking. It’s where squatters pretended to own real houses and children made do with make-believe.

But these seeds were sown by an angry young Catholic chased from finer society. A priest, stubborn and cursing. The local Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians nurtured that seed, and in time the people and the priest, the abbot and the imam, worked together, as though the Buddha, Muhammad, and Jesus Christ were brothers and best friends. No doctrine, dogma, or creed was lorded. No growth tethered chapter to verse. The only belief that mattered was the one they shared. In the children. That was common, sacred ground.

Nourished like this, the seeds exploded with growth. There was a harvest, then another and another. The seeds grow still today, more than three decades later, a genus of hope thriving in the muck, as if it had been indigenous to the slums all along.

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"... Drawn to service in Thailand on a whim, the misfit American seminary student found a calling amongst the Thai downtrodden, even living in the slums himself. In founding his Mercy Centre organization 30 years ago ... the irascible Father Joe confronts the interweaving effects of slum life, the sex trade, HIV/AIDS, drug addiction, illiteracy and orphanhood. In the process he rebukes sex traffickers, Thai government officials and even the Catholic Church...." 

~ Publishers Weekly