Boston born and bred, and educated, for the most part, in Catholic schools, I still live just outside the city in a small Cape with my wife Carol and rescued greyhound, Juniper. I’m a Library Director at a Catholic seminary in Massachusetts, where I’ve been for six years.

My interests are pretty prosaic: fly fishing, cultural issues, literature, landscape design and gardening, to name a few. Currently I am studying at the Landscape Institute of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, working towards a certificate in Landscape Design. Some of my favorite authors would be, Walker Percy, Sigrid Undset, Thomas Merton, and Wendell Berry. Besides Thomas Merton, my favorite monastic author is Michael Casey, a monk of Tarawara Abbey in Australia. He’s written some very fine books on the spiritual life, deeply influenced, of course, by his monastic experience.

I suppose the subject of ‘Monk?’ blog could be considered one of my less prosaic interests. I lived for a brief time as a novice at the Abbey of the Genesee, a Cistercian monastery in upstate New York. My relationship with the community goes back twenty-five years, and is one of the significant anchors in my life. It’s my belief monasticism has had over a millenia and a half a most profound formative impact on Western culture and civilization, an impact often overlooked or not understood at all. It’s my intention to be a ’small voice in the wilderness’ of the new media offering the real story as I understand it for those who are interested.

That’s about it. Happy reading, and please share your own thoughts on the monastic life and what it means for us today.

(Update: Our sweet dog Juni died in May of 2006, and Carol and I are moving to midcoast Maine in April 2007. I’ve completed studies at The Landscape Institute of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University and will be opening McFadden Garden Design, a landscape design business in Maine, this at the age of 58! Wish us luck!)