A cinemactress’s southern plantation last week became a Trappist monastery. To Conyers, Ga., 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, came 20 monks (10 priests, 3 clerics or students, 7 lay brothers), all ...

Runners make their way up and down the 103 steps of Monks Mound at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville in 2013. Steve Nagy snagy@bnd.com Q: I recently made yet another visit to the ...

Trappists, Sam Mulgrew tells me, “are very land-based.” We’re sitting in the office of Trappist Caskets, just a short walk from New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa. Sam is a layman, not a monk, but he ...

Return of the Monks: The Trappists Go Back to Norway More than 500 years after most abbeys and monasteries in Norway were dissolved and destroyed in the Protestant Reformation, the northernmost ...

Pope Francis greets Abbot General Eamon Fitzgerald during an audience with Trappists at the Vatican Sept. 23. The pope met those participating in the Trappists’ general chapter. (Credit: CNS ...

THE NIGHT IS COLD. A SILENT NIGHT. I am alone on a hill above the sluggish Shenandoah River and below the bare winter forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Like a handful of other guests, I have come ...

The road to Coolspring, in Virginia, is pleasant in early spring. Down the Blue Ridge slopes into the Shenandoah Valley, roadside plaques mark historic battles and gallant deeds of bygone days. At the ...

We’ve talked about the Trappists before, but here’s a quick refresher: Also known as the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, the Trappists are a Roman Catholic sect that follows the Rule of ...

When the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance left Oka, Quebec, to escape suburban sprawl, they left behind an oversized, aging building. Their new Trappist abbey, nested in the forests and ...