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Posts published in September 2023

75 years later: Remembering my Tin Can Abbey

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I have a strange and nostalgic affection for Quonset huts.  My odd architectural ardor for the prefab semi-circular metal structures that housed World War II airplanes…

The American Monastic Archive Project

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 By Michael Patrick O’Brien– As a kid, Daniel Shanahan loved to visit his uncle, a Trappist monk at New Melleray Abbey in Iowa. Shanahan considered joining a monastery too, but…

The Three Rings of Elena Ivanovna Nabokov

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By Gary Topping– Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, is a loving recollection of life during the last years of Czarist Russia and the first twenty years of his exile in…

Neshama: A new idea of community for Jewish men

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By Jathan Janove (guest contributor)– At a Hanukkah party in Salt Lake City in December 2000, Bert Spiegel (see If Jews had saints…) approached me and said he wanted to…

The pink nuns who stand up to human traffickers

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– On a recent warm summer evening, a lovely young nun dressed in pink and wearing a simple white veil visited our church and told us some…

Mosaic Magic

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By Michael Patrick O’Brien– When it comes to appreciating church art, I’ve always been more of a paintings/sculpture kind of guy than a fan of mosaics. The imaginative cut stone…