Father Tom’s Penance

General Fiction

Pages: 218 Ratings:

Book Format: Choose an option

*Your order will be dispatched after the publication date of 27-03-2026

Tag along with Father Thomas Flannery on his circuit ride as he wends his way through western Kentucky and Tennessee in 1948. Listen to his deeply meaningful and moving sermons. Eavesdrop on the sanctity of the confessional as he listens carefully to the penitent. He pronounces absolution and assigns very appropriate penance to each contrite sinner.

Meet some of his old friends along the way and the new friends he makes on the journey in his old Model A Ford.

Father Tom struggles with his personal weaknesses and his past and learns much about the forgiveness Christ offers us. He also learns about true maturity and how one can find it.

He wrestles with great mysteries as a good theologian would and even questions Church doctrine. His compassion, faith, sense of humor, and work ethic help make him a great priest.

Explore with Father Tom the magic of memories, dreams, and fantasies. Enjoy this nostalgic trip back to yesteryear, when life seemed to be more simple—but it really wasn’t!

Thomas Herzfeld is a retired teacher and economist from Northern New Jersey. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree with distinction from the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in 1978. After working briefly for Shell Chemical Co. in a plant in Deer Park, Texas, Herzfeld became a Teaching Fellow at the University of Houston.

There he taught courses in Introductory Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Statistics, Intermediate Microeconomics, and the Economics of Money and Banking. He received his Master of Arts degree there in 1985. He has also taught as an Adjunct Professor at Houston Baptist University, San Jacinto College (Houston), and Bergen Community College (Paramus, New Jersey).

His career included work in retail management in the book business and accounting in wholesale and imported office furniture. For more than two decades, he operated a private tutoring service. During the last decade of his career, he worked as a Mathematics, Accounting, and Statistics tutor for Passaic County Community College (Wanaque and Paterson, New Jersey) and C2 Education (Livingston, New Jersey), where he also taught physics.

Mr. Herzfeld began his professional writing career in June 2017. He joyfully worships God at St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church in Stirling, New Jersey.

His works include:

Logarithms in 30 Minutes (2017)
Hypothesis Testing Made More Understandable (2018)
How to Have a Civil Conversation in an Increasingly Uncivil and Hostile Environment (2018)
How to Stop the Assault on History (2019)
Basic Trigonometry Without Memorization (still unpublished) (2019)
A Leader’s Guide to Maintaining Civility in a Hostile Political Environment (Dorance) (2020)
It’s Okay to Be Catholic: A Guide for “ex-Catholic” Protestants on Returning to the Universal Church (2020)
North Jersey Commute 2043: A Tale of the “Green New Deal” (2022)
Father Tom’s Penance (a novel) (2023)