Dom Michael Brunner

A native of Rochester, N.Y, he graduated from Howard University in Washington, DC with a BA in Sociology in 1973. He then spent 25 years in hotel management in New York City, Washington DC, Baltimore and Miami Beach, ending that career as Operations Director over 5 hotels in Maryland. During this time he studied non-Christian religions intensively.

He discovered Christian mystical tradition and writers in in college; his response was …this is it! It is contemplation or nothing .  Later, within Islam, Al Ghazzali, Attar, al-Hallaj, al-Arabi, Rumi and others put together for him the spiritual, mystical logic of the Incarnation. (Attar’s “Conference of the Birds” was especially meaningful. He ultimately returned to the Catholic Church and became Director of Religious Education and Youth Minister at an intensely multicultural parish in suburban Washington, DC.

He made his profession as a Benedictine monk at St. Louis Abbey in 1998 and returned to school to study philosophy at SLU and theology at Aquinas Institute of Theology, where he received an MA (with honors) in theology in 2002. He became the Headmaster of St. Louis Priory School in 2005 and served until 2012, when he became pastor of Saint Anselm Parish. He continued to teach Moral Theology, The Church and the Poor, World Religions, and World Music in World Religions.  

He currently teaches World Religions at Portsmouth Abbey School. His life story  A Slow Boat to China” appears in Touched by God: Ten Monastic Journeys, published in 2008.