(Note from Gary Topping: The Boy Monk has a very special guest blogger this week: Bishop Duane G. Hunt, who led the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City from…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Good Saint Nicholas, whose feast day we celebrated on December 6, probably is known as the greatest gift giver of all time. His little known Utah…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– For the beginning of Advent 2020, in the midst of a stressful and challenging pandemic year, I sought refuge. I found it in one of the…

By Gary Topping– It happens to anyone who spends an appreciable amount of time in front of a classroom.  My wife, Marianna Hopkins, experienced it once during her distinguished career…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– We lawyers love to solve mysteries. One that recently vexed my fellow lawyer Bill White (owner of the old Huntsville monastery farm) and me was the…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– One day many years ago, when I was much younger and visiting the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, I watched two monks in an unusual animated…

By Gary Topping– This week our blogger-in-chief Mike O’Brien enumerated some of the ways his unique style of parenting developed, given the absence during his formative years of his father’s…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Should I mark—or even acknowledge—the golden anniversary of a marriage ending? This is the difficult question racing through my mind this month as the 50th anniversary…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– A great advantage we fathers have when dispensing advice to our young daughters about dating and men is that we often have been, in a past…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– I may be the biggest fan of Northern Utah’s Ogden Valley who never lived there. As a result, during a recent COVID-19 sheltering-at-home-and-catching-up-on-my-reading phase, I cracked…