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Alas, Judge found more of the same at the non-Jesuit Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., an institution founded to promote a national presence for Catholic intellectual life in America but now in open revolt against the teachings of the Church. Judge attended Catholic U. in the 1980s, at the height of the controversy surrounding Father Charles Curran, the moral theologian who lost his position for supporting the right of Catholics to express faithful dissent from the Church's teachings on sexual ethics, particularly the ban on artificial birth control reaffirmed in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Curran lost his battle but clearly won the war of popular opinion, with most students and faculty rallying to his side in the name of academic freedom.

Judge looks back on these developments with a heavy heart, but he concedes that the near apostasy of his Catholic educational institutions caused him little distress at the time. Like many young American males of his generation, he was less concerned with theology than with sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. His drug of choice was alcohol, which he was able to control for some time through the alcoholic/workaholic discipline of an upwardly mobile East Coast professional. After graduating from Catholic U., Judge began a successful career in journalism, writing on popular culture, politics, and religion for mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post and left-of-center weeklies such as The Progressive and In These Times.

Despite this professional success, Judge eventually realized that he had lost control of his life to alcohol. Sparing us the details of his collapse and recovery, Judge simply states that he drank too much, did stupid things, and overcame his alcoholism with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. In a similarly refreshing manner, he insists that most of the best times of his life involved alcohol in one way or another. Drinking with friends, staying up all night talking, laughing, listening to music and dancing—these are good things. Looking back on his recovery, Judge sees Alcoholics Anonymous as at least as much of a problem as alcohol itself. Rooted in the tradition of Protestant conversion narratives, the 12-step program of A.A. found one of its earliest advocates in Father Ed Dowling, a Jesuit priest who saw in it principles similar to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. According to Judge, in recent decades A.A. has, like Catholic schools, largely rejected its Christian roots; like other popular therapies, the secularized 12-step program has become an end in itself. To Judge's credit, he refuses to define himself in terms of his disease.

Still, God and Man at Georgetown Prep is a conversion story of sorts—but a distinctly Catholic conversion story. Judge never officially left the Church, and he presents the "reversion" to his childhood faith less as a turn from sin to salvation than from indifference to commitment. The turning point in Judge's life came not with his recovery from alcoholism but with the death of his father from cancer. Here again, Judge writes refreshingly against genre expectations. His father's death leads not to emotional trauma but to an intellectual and spiritual awakening: "My father had been dead for several months before it dawned on me that he'd been a Catholic."

Judge knew, of course, that his father had always attended Mass faithfully, but only by going through his father's book collection after his death did he realize that his father had been a serious intellectual Catholic. Judge's twenty years of Catholic education had failed to impress upon him the possibility that being Catholic had anything at all to do with the intellectual life. Catholicism was rules, doctrines, and Mass on Sunday. Exploring his father's book collection, Judge discovered the intellectually rich and challenging Catholicism of G. K. Chesterton, Jacques Maritain, Joseph Pieper, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. After reading the books that had shaped his father's mid-century Catholicism, Judge came to a new self-understanding: "I am a member of a generation of Catholics raised after Vatican II who was cheated out of a Catholic education."

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