ITMS 20th General Meeting
Speakers
Adam Bucko
Adam Bucko is an Episcopal priest, spiritual director and activist who has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and the growing New Monastic movement. He has taught engaged contemplative spirituality in Europe and the United States, and has authored Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation and co-authored Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, and The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living. Committed to an integration of contemplation and just practice, he cofounded an award-winning non-profit, the Reciprocity Foundation, where he spent 15 years working with homeless youth living on the streets of New York City, providing spiritual care, developing programs to end youth homelessness, and articulating a vision for spiritual mentoring in a post-religious world. He currently serves as a director of The Center for Spiritual Imagination at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in New York, and is a member of “The Community of the Incarnation,” a ‘new monastic’ community dedicated to democratizing the gifts of monastic spirituality and teaching contemplative spirituality, in the context of hearing and responding to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth.
Carolyn Forché is Director of Readings and Talks at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and University Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University. She is most recently the author of the poetry collection In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin, 2020) and the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019). She is also the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forché is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton, 1993) and the coeditor of Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (W. W. Norton, 2014). She has been a human rights activist for thirty years.
Douglas Hertler, also known as Doug Lory, is an actor, playwright, retreat leader, and NYC tour guide. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, the two professional actor’s unions in the U.S., and his career has included roles in television, film, and theater. He is also an actor/educator at Fordham University School of Law where he works with student attorneys in both client interview simulations as well as trial law examinations, exploring the intangible components of interpersonal and group communication. As a NYC tour guide Doug has connected with tens of thousands of travelers for over 20 years, sharing the exciting, inspiring, and sometimes tragic history of a city which counts the ethnic and religious diversity of the world as its citizenry. He holds a BA in Speech/Communication/Theater from Monmouth University. He is a member of the International Thomas Merton Society and the American Teilhard Association. He lives in Queens, NY with his incredible wife Alex.
James Martin, SJ, is a Jesuit priest, editor at large of America magazine, consultor to the Vatican's Secretariat for Communications, and author of numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest, Jesus: A Pilgrimage and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. His other books include, Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity, My Life with the Saints and Between Heaven and Mirth were named by Publishers Weekly as "Best Books" of the year, and three of his books have received Christopher Awards. Father Martin is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, having appeared on all the major networks, and in such diverse outlets as The Colbert Report, Fresh Air, On Being, Fox & Friends, PBS's NewsHour, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe, as well as on the History Channel, BBC, and Vatican Radio.
Carrie Newcomer is an internationally touring Emmy-winning performer, Grammy-acknowledged songwriter, recording artist, poet, activist, and retreat facilitator. Newcomer has been called a “prairie mystic” by the Boston Globe, “ with a voice as rich as Godiva Chocolate” by The Austin Statesman, and “she asks all the right questions” by Rolling Stone. Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver wrote, "She is more than a singer-songwriter. She’s a poet, storyteller, snake-charmer, good neighbor, friend, and lover, minister of the wide-eyed gospel of hope and grace." Carrie has 21 nationally released albums, including A Great Wild Mercy, and The Beautiful Not Yet, and three books of poetry and essays, including Until Now: New Poems. Carrie was a cultural Ambassador to India performing for Indian audiences, resulting in her interfaith hunger relief album Everything is Everywhere with master of the Indian Classical sarod, Amjad Ali Khan. She toured Africa and the Middle East supporting health & hunger organizations and non-violent conflict resolution. Carrie facilitates retreats on the topics of songwriting, spirituality, personal growth, hope, and resiliency. She co-hosts The Growing Edge Podcast with beloved author Parker J. Palmer. She currently authors, A Gathering of Spirits, one of Substack’s top five music offerings.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a writer, poet, scholar, and professor at Fordham University in New York City where she teaches English, Creative Writing, and American Catholic Studies. She also serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. O’Donnell is a graduate of Penn State University and holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in English Language & Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of 12 volumes of poetry, including The View from Childhood: New and Selected Poems (2026) and Dear Dante (2024), and four volumes of prose including Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor (2020) and Flannery O'Connoer: Fiction Fired by Faith (2015). Her essays, poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous journals including America, Commonweal, Spiritus, and Christianity and Literature. The Merton Seasonal recently included five of her poems on "Merton in Alaska."
Stephanie Paulsell is the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies, Emerita at Harvard Divinity School where she taught a seminar on Thomas Merton for several years. Author most recently of Religion Around Virginia Woolf (Penn State, 2019), co-author of The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests (Harvard, 2026), and editor of Toni Morrison: Goodness and the Literary Imagination (U of Virginia, 2019), she also contributed an essay to Merton and the Protestant Tradition (Fons Vitae, 2016), edited by her father, William O. Paulsell. She is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and, with novelist René Steinke, writes “Fresh Chapel,” a forum on writing, art and the sacred, on Substack.
Paul Pynkoski currently serves as the President of the International Thomas Merton Society. He has been a presenter at Merton gatherings in North America, Argentina and the UK and has contributed articles and reviews to The Merton Seasonal, The Merton Annual, Orthodoxy in Dialogue and The Anglican, with particular interest in exploring through contemporary music and Merton’s writing the intersection of spirituality, politics and the arts. He is a founding member of Voices for Peace, and co-chairs the board of Sanctuary, a community that supports those struggling with homelessness and addiction. He and his wife, Tania Natale, reside in Toronto, Ontario.
Paul Quenon has been a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani for over 60 years. His Novitiate formation was under Thomas Merton. His latest book is Where Time Its Silence Keeps: Poems from Gethsemani. Among his other books are How to Be, a collection of letters with journalist Judith Valente on matters of mutual interest, his memoir: In Praise of the Useless Life which received the Catholic Press award for memoirs, Amounting to Nothing, and Unquiet Vigil.