Michael Patrick O’Brien is a Catholic husband, father, and lawyer, raised by a divorced but devoted Irish Catholic mother and by Trappist monks in Mormon-dominated Utah. The Huntsville, Utah monastery was his beloved home away from home after his parents divorced. His mother, orphaned young, had enjoyed a close relationship with her uncle, a Vermont parish priest. During the O’Brien family troubles, she took Mike to visit the Utah Trappists. They befriended the family and from about 1972 to 1983, Mike grew up as a kind of boy monk. It was a unique boyhood, and Mike wrote writing a book about this decade which set his life on a trajectory so much more positive than the fate that often befalls children from broken homes and difficult economic circumstances. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021. Mike enjoyed that book-writing experience so much that he started this blog, a conversation with some of his friends: a social justice advocate, an historian, a Catholic deacon, a writer/photographer, a scientist, and a young man who is a dancer, artist, and teacher who is a Christian but is not a Catholic. Among other things, they discuss church, religion, and spirituality in the twenty first century.
A friendly conversation about church, religion, spirituality, life, family, and travel in the twenty first century. Please feel free to join our conversation in a kind and civil manner!