By Gary Topping– Looking back over my career as a historian, I am struck by how much of it has involved the work of the great Utah and Mormon historian,…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– To be an O’Brien does not mean you are ugly, but it does mean you are not an icon of classic physical beauty either. Generally, we…

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…

 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– During a recent trip to New England to visit family and friends, my wife Vicki and I decided to search for some of the famous Trappist…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I’ve never attended the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference held each summer in the Green Mountains near Middlebury, Vermont. So, this year I sent myself a…