Thomas Merton

Who do I pay attention to who may be prophetically controversial today?

“Practicing to be a contemplative," says Zen priest Sensei Zenju, "you’re learning to be embodied and to be boundless at the same time.”

In the private journals of contemplative thinker Thomas Merton, Sophronia Scott found guidance for how to live in these fraught times.

Merton has been my spiritual companion, but as a Black woman, I have questions for him.

After 60 years at Gethsemani Abbey, Paul Quenon wrote a memoir.

Almost any page of this collection yields the precise puzzling haunting music of Dillard’s mind at work.

This collection is suffused with one of poetry’s most fundamental aims: making meaning out of suffering and loss.

From his youth Lax experienced a love of God that would not abate, calling him toward both solitude and engagement with others.

I knew Jannie Swart's witness would have a lasting impact on our seminary. I didn't anticipate how it would challenge me in the classroom.

A memoir becomes explicitly Christian when it derives its literary power from the power of the gospel. It doesn't preach, it shows.

This spring, I didn't find any morels in the woods around my house. But I did find a lot of other things.

For Andrew Elphinstone, human selfishness and violence are not evidence of a world gone wrong. They show a person ripe for transformation.

The journals of Merton, Woolf and others encouraged me to see my birthday as a new beginning—and to live my 50th year as a year of jubilee.

As a graduate student, my father visited the Abbey of Gethsemani. His experiences there entered him in some permanent way.

The deep attention and reverence that Thomas Merton and Abdul Aziz brought to each other's books, traditions and lives undergirded their friendship, and the frank way they explored their similarities and differences enlivened it.