Jim Manney grew up in Northern New Jersey and was educated by Jesuits at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, with a junior year at Campion Hall, the Jesuit College at Oxford University. He flirted with an academic career but dropped out of graduate school to become a newspaper reporter. After stints as a corporate editor (IBM and Burroughs Corp.), and an editor at the University of Michigan, he worked for three religious publishers as a magazine and book editor.

In the early 2000s, while working with Jesuits at Loyola Press in Chicago, he discovered Ignatian spirituality, first as personal spiritual renewal, then as a professional project. What Matters Most and Why is his sixth book on Ignatian spirituality.  He has also compiled two collections of readings from the Ignatian tradition.

Jim is a serious baseball fan, an amateur watercolor painter and urban sketcher, a volunteer ESL and basic literacy tutor, an ardent fan of Michigan football and basketball.  He enjoys straight-ahead jazz, and both literary fiction and genre entertainment. Jim and his wife, Susan, have four adult children and eight grandchildren--five in Minnesota, two in New York, and one in Ann Arbor.