Tuesdays with Merton Podcast

  Merton Was in Love With Wales — its poetry, its Celtic sensibility, its ravishing beauty and rich history. Although he came to the art of David Jones rather late in his life, he understood implicitly what Jones was doing as a visionary. There are some striking things that they were doing in parallel unaware of each other, probing the past, resurrecting forgotten cultural memories, attending to the power of ritual and sacrament, aching for unity and harmony. This session will explore some of these creative and spiritual convergences. Dr. Michael W. Higgins is a university president, biographer, journalist, scholar, and media commentator. His book on Cardinal Newman will appear in the Spring of 2021 and his book on Pope Francis in 2023. Past publications on Merton include: Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton; Faithful Visionary; The Unquiet Monk; and Thomas Merton: Pilgrim in Process (ed).

Every wisdom tradition describes in its own way a cloud of unknowing that veils the utterly ineffable source and force coursing through this universe as its very life. With paradoxical lucidity on matters of darkness and unknowing, Thomas Merton shared his experience of being "overshadowed" by the Cloud of enveloping Mystery. His desire to live into its Presence has become a well-scripted legacy of post-modern spiritual emergence, written in an idiom that continues to speak cogently to the spiritual pilgrims of the second millennium. This session explores Merton's "familiarity" with the anonymous 14th century master of The Cloud, and his own transmission of its still emerging wisdom. Dr. Kathleen Noone Deignan of the Congregation of Notre Dame is founding director of the Deignan Institute for Earth and Spirit at Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, where she was Professor of Religious Studies for 40 years while guiding The Merton Contemplative Initiative and co-convening The Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue. Past President of the International Thomas Merton Society, she is a regular presenter at its meetings.  Her book-length publications include When the Trees Say Nothing: Thomas Merton’s Writings on Nature and Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours, including an audio-book that includes her sacred songs and psalmody.

This is a Tuesdays with Merton bonus episode from the archives of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. It was recorded at the 16th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society at Santa Clara University in California, June 28, 2019. Robert Ellsberg is the Publisher of Orbis Books and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among All Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. His other award-winning books include: A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives; Blessed Among Us: Saintly Lives for Every Day; All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time; and The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. He served as managing editor of The Catholic Worker for two years during the last years of Dorothy Day, and he has dedicated himself to editing her work and promoting her mission. He has edited Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, and All the Way to Heaven: Selected Letters of Dorothy Day. He has edited anthologies of Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, Flannery O’Connor, Charles de Foucauld, and Pope Francis. For the past four years he has written a daily entry on saints for Give Us This Day.

Catholic Engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement has been hesitant, at best. At worst, Catholic leaders deride it with virulent opposition and denigration. As the Movement for Black Lives claims Malcolm X as one of their inspira­tions, this presentation will examine Merton's engagement with Malcolm X and radical Black thought to suggest how Catholics should engage the contemporary movement for racial justice. Bryan N. Massingale holds the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham University. A priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, he is a leader in Catholic theology and ethics as the current President-Elect of the Society of Christian Ethics, a past Convener of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, and a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He is the author of the award-winning book Racial Justice and the Catholic Church and a public intellectual who frequently addresses issues of racial and sexual justice.

Anne Pearson is a Junior at Bellarmine University majoring in clinical psychology and political science and minoring in criminal justice studies. In her free time, she enjoys reading, cooking and engaging in bipartisan discussion with industry executives through the National Millennial Community. She presented “Thomas Merton, Black Lives Matter, and White Passivity” for Bellarmine University’s third annual TEDx event “What in the World?” on February 6, 2021. The video of the entire event is available at: www.bellarmine.edu/TEDx.

During these turbulent, uncertain times of pandemics – corona virus, racism, unbridled individualism – and, thankfully, of moral reckoning, Thomas Merton offers a welcome and much needed message of hope.  He reminds us that we are “created for JOY.”  In this presentation, we will consider how Merton experienced and envisioned joy, particularly the joy of being human and the joy of friendship.  For Merton, joy is both promise and vocation.  How, then inspired by Merton, might we learn to delight in the “immense joy” of being human and “together  . . . travel our own road to joy”? Christine M. Bochen, professor emerita of religious studies at Nazareth College, Rochester, New York and a founding member and past president of the International Thomas Merton Society, has taught courses, given retreats, and spoken on Merton in a variety of venues in the United States, Canada, and abroad.  Christine is co-author, with William H. Shannon and Patrick F. O’Connell, of The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia; editor of Courage for Truth, Learning to Love, and Thomas Merton: Essential Writings; and co-editor, with William H. Shannon, of Cold War Letters and Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters. 

This is a Tuesdays with Merton Bonus episode from the archives of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, is professor emerita of systematic theology at Boston College. It was the seventh annual Thomas Merton Center Black History Month Lecture, taped live February 26, 2013 at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky.  

In our time together I will share aspects of Merton’s life and teachings that had a profound and lasting effect in my own life and in my attempts to pass on to others what Thomas Merton has passed on to me. These foundational aspects of Merton’s life and teachings include our own unfolding life with all its blessings and broken edges embodying the presence of God that protects us from nothing even as it unexplainably sustains us in all things, as well as Merton’s vision of the hidden wholeness where everything connects as realized in the con­templative depths of the world’s great religions and in all of life. Dr. James Finley received spiritual guidance from Thomas Merton as a novice at the Abbey of Gethse­mani. He is a contemplative teacher and writer and a retired clinical psychologist. He leads the weekly podcast “Turning to the Mystics” in his role as core teacher in the Living School for Action and Contemplation founded by Father Richard Rohr. James is the author of Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, The Contemplative Heart, and Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God.

Exercises in Merton's journals can mentor our lives, producing epiphanies of the graced interdependence of all things. Jonathan Montaldo served as director of the Merton Center and as ITMS president. He co-edited The Intimate Merton. Renditions of Merton’s writing include A Year with Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence, and Choosing to Love the World. A co-general editor for Fons Vitae’s Merton series, he presents Merton retreats.

Through image, word, and poetry, this presentation explores Merton's encounter with the biblical Wisdom tradition, the remembrance of God in a feminine key. How should the remembrance of God as Wisdom-Sophia shape the crises of our times? Christopher Pramuk is the author of Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton, and At Play in Creation: Merton's Awakening to the Feminine Divine. He holds the University Chair of Ignatian Thought and Imagination at Regis University.