By Michael Patrick O’Brien– A rather simple word—love—is at the heart of St. Valentine’s Day. Yet, what’s most clear about the popular February holiday is that it’s complicated, both historically…

By Michael Patrick O-Brien– For winter, here is a cold weather excerpt from Monastery Mornings, my 2021 memoir about growing up at the now-closed Trappist monastery—Abbey of the Holy Trinity—in…

By Jathan Janove (Guest Contributor)– As I reflected on what my 2024 New Year’s resolutions should be, it struck me that I could be donating more money to nonprofits and…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Some fifty years ago I was an altar boy serving Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ogden. I was a reliable assistant, but prone to…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– No one reaches the lovely Santa Rita Abbey—the only Trappist monastery in the American Southwest—without taking some kind of a journey. Mine started at another monastery,…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Did you ever hear the phrase “there must be something in the water?” I probably first started to understand this notion fifty years ago, as a…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– One of my most enduring relationships—lasting half a century and counting—is with a 100-year-old poem written by a man I never met. In late 1923, well…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– One day an old law partner of mine—perhaps the quintessential rogue and curmudgeon—looked down at me over his half-moon reading glasses and sneered, “Your problem, Mr.…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I’ve read and loved “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (aka “The Night Before Christmas”) all my life. And to celebrate the poem’s publication bicentennial, now I…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My facts of life in the late 1970s—a self-absorbed teenager and the youngest member of my divorced family—erected barriers that sometimes stymied my boyish notions of…