By Gary Topping– Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon last summer featured a table of books labelled “Must Reads,” or some such thing. My wife bit, and purchased Rebecca…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– During our 2011 trip to Ireland, my three young children often had an odd reaction to the many lovely monuments to Irish historical events and figures that we…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Sometimes I worry that my ora and labora are out of whack. Although the two words sound somewhat orthopedic, I am not thinking about the aging…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– The photo is like an impressionistic painting, where blurred images somehow manage to depict clear reality. Or, in this case, reality transcended, for it is my…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– As a boy, my friends the Utah Trappist monks often told me about wonderful quiet weekends at their hillside retreat called the “Hermitage.” It took almost…
By Gary Topping– A Catholic friend of ours at Our Lady of the Lake parish in Seattle sent the following document which the parish is circulating among its members and…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– The fall business retreat was a corporate office staple when I started my legal career in the waning years of the twentieth century. The formula was…
By Gary Topping– During my career as a historian, I have conducted a number of oral history interviews. We do these interviews when we can find a participant in an…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– In the busy Salt Lake City law firm where I have worked for the last third of a century, lunch often is just one more item…
By Gary Topping– I grew up on the southern Oregon coast, and while I enjoyed living there, its drizzly humid climate did not always agree with me. During the first…