Shane Liesegang, SJ, was born in Rochester, Minnesota, and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. He studied cognitive science and theater at the University of Virginia and received a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. He worked designing theme parks and making video games for over a decade, doing everything from graphics programming to quest design while living in Washington, D.C., and his spiritual home of Los Angeles. As he got more involved in his parish there, and moved by the world’s hunger for justice, he started looking beyond entertainment. Shane was first drawn to the Society of Jesus by its work with the marginalized, and through that he discovered Ignatian spirituality where he was delighted to combine his creative and spiritual lives in imaginative prayer.
Once he entered the Jesuits, Shane was sent to work in youth prisons, hospitals, halfway houses and schools. He renovated houses in Native Alaskan villages and assisted with refugee health care in South Africa. He earned two more degrees in philosophy and international political economy at Fordham University in New York before moving to the Middle East at the height of the pandemic.
Shane lived in Lebanon during its collapse, working for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) there and across the region in Iraq, Jordan and Syria. He has spent the last several years studying theology at the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry, taking one year in the Philippines to specifically learn migration theology and pastoral care of migrants. He was ordained a deacon in Manila and very happily began sacramental ministries in the chapels of Payatas, baptizing over 200 individuals in that time. After ordination, he will spend the summer providing pastoral ministry at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon, before moving to Bangkok, Thailand, to become the regional reconciliation officer for JRS in the Asia Pacific region.
