By Michael Patrick O’Brien– In the middle of a pandemic, economic doldrums, and unprecedented political storms, my first grandson Walter Patrick Dahlberg made his debut into a world that sorely…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– For the first several decades of our fraternity, I loved but was not close to my older brother Kevin Peter O’Brien, Jr. There were many reasons,…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– After years of knowing her only by rudimentary biographical facts (see: Mary Leonard story part one), I finally “heard” my dearly departed Irish great aunt Mary…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Yesterday  (part 1 here), I began the story of how—in addition to learning basic biographical facts—I also first started to “hear” the voice of my great…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My great aunt was born in Ireland almost a hundred years before me. I entered this world a decade after she died. Given such deep temporal…

By Marianna Hopkins (Guest Contributor)– In 1954, when I was five years old, I woke to a hysterically crying mother who had just learned from a phone call that her…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I will never forget a haunting summer in a trailer park in the early 1980s, when suicide lived just down the road. In the early 1980s,…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– On the 1970s Catholic school lawns and the 1980s rooftops of my Ogden, Utah hometown, I proved beyond a reasonable doubt that I was meant to…

By Gary Topping– I was as appalled as most other Americans at the sight of the assault on our nation’s capitol on January 6, 2021.  Not only is it a…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Anyone who thinks February is defined by presidents, valentines, or groundhogs has never spent any time around a parochial school during Catholic auction season. Just after…