Bob Johnson University, August 1990. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, the world feels close to apocalypse, and “Dr. Bob" is calling from the pulpit for a bulldozer to drive the United Nations headquarters into the East River. Ten thousand students applaud. Two of those hands belong to Nate O'Connor — the good son, the model Christian, the senior who has spent twenty-two years inside the only world he's ever known.

Nate doesn't yet know he's in a cult. He knows he loves his best friend Danny Becker, the pastor's son and partner-in-crime since childhood, and their friend Tom, a theater major who can talk his way out of anything. He knows he's starting to love Angela, a sharp law student he's met across enemy lines at a “worldly" university. He knows he's reading a professor's course on “Modern Cults" and noticing, uncomfortably, how well the definitions fit the place teaching them. And he knows he's been placed on spiritual probation — the campus's highest mark of shame, reserved for the students who will almost certainly not be coming back.

Spiritual Probation is a novel about the year of a young man’s tragedy and great losses: his faith, his idealism, and the only identity he's ever been allowed to have — and begins, slowly, to build something truer in its place. By turns furious, hilarious, and deeply tender, it's the story of what it takes to walk out of a cult while everyone you love is still inside.