MONCKS CORNER, S.C. — “A year and a half ago, I could do anything — run the chain saw, cut up trees, use a backhoe.” Brother Joseph Swedo was bent forward in his chair, his rugged hands folded ...

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 ...

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 ...