By Michael Patrick O’Brien– The most bizarre and memorable noon hour at my law office in downtown Salt Lake City started with no hint whatsoever of the remarkable events about…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– July is rodeo season in Utah, as well as the month for the raucous Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona made famous by Ernest Hemingway in…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I had an unusual boyhood. After a painful family divorce in the 1970s, I grew up without a traditional father. My surrogate fathers were Trappist monks.…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– (Note: this is part 2 of a two part series about the interfaith out reach of the Utah monks. For part one, see Talking the Talk:…
By Gary Topping– (Editor’s note: on June 1, 2023, Gary wrote about his general Sanpete County memories.) For a period of some weeks in 1978 I lived in a dorm…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– A few weeks ago, my friend Joel Campbell, a BYU journalism professor, asked me to give a talk about how the Utah Trappist monks from Huntsville…
By Gary Topping– When you are driving down Highway 89 and you cross the border into Sanpete County, Utah, you can feel the clocks moving more slowly. The past is…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I went to church recently with the Desi Arnaz and Al Capone families. Well, sort of. During a recent visit to Miami, my wife Vicki and…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– One of the most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century—Catholic Holy Cross nun Madeleva Wolff—drew lyrical inspiration from her time in both Ogden and Salt Lake…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I used to think of traditional or ethnic urban neighborhoods as old-timey places. I’d envision the post-potato-famine Irish tenements of nineteenth century New York City, Mario…