Diary of a Young Missionary

Diary of a Young Missionary

All This Freshness Fuming

by: Fr. Barry Martinson, SJ

A sequel to Diary of a Young Jesuit, this book tells of a Jesuit missionary’s adventures during the first seven years of his assignment in Taiwan from 1969 to 1976.

What is unique about Diary of a Young Missionary are the joyful, humorous, and inspiring memories of Jesuit training and the personal adventures that accompanied it, especially the section detailing the one-of-a-kind year spent with the poor of Orchid Island. This memoir is written as a diary that gives it a sense of “immediacy” that makes it stand out from the more conventional memoir genre.

As a gateway for those considering life as a missionary, for men and women already serving God in distant lands, and for everyone seeking inspiration rooted in reality—or even for the armchair adventurer, this Diary reveals the daunting challenge of working in the fields of the Lord, where the harvest, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, is ripe with “freshness fuming.”

Paperback
296 pages
Ignatiuc Press
March 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781621647935