Brother Joseph picks peaches in the courtyard at New Melleray Abbey, a Trappist Monastery near Dubuque, on Sept. 8. As part of his work at the Abbey, Brother Joseph maintains a small orchard of apple ...
In the late 1960s, a young NCR reporter named Colman McCarthy saw the emerging decline of American Trappist monasteries and offered a diagnosis: The monastic life is not active enough. Looking back ...