The town of Spencer, in central Massachusetts, isn't well known for ... well, anything, really. But it's about to become internationally famous — at least in beer-drinking circles. Spencer is home to ...

SPENCER, Mass. (AP) -- For more than a century, Catholic Cistercian monks known as Trappists have been brewing and selling what many beer lovers consider some of the best in the world. Eight ...

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 ...

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 2023, my wife Liz embarked on a self-guided spiritual retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Nelson County, Ky. She returned with an armful of books and souvenirs from the ...