November 10, 2003 marks the fortieth anniversary of the inauguration of the Thomas Merton Collection at Bellarmine College (now University) in Louisville, KY.  This collection, approved by the college and by the Abbey of Gethsemani as well as by Merton himself, was initially housed in the Bellarmine Library’s Thomas Merton Room, dedicated a year later on November 8, 1964, and eventually led to the establishment of the Thomas Merton Studies Center as the official repository of Merton’s papers, announced on November 9, 1969.  The Thomas Merton Center, as it is now known, contains the largest collection of Merton materials in the world, with more than 45,000 items.  To commemorate this anniversary, the Merton Center is sponsoring a series of presentations during the fall of 2003, to be held in the Cralle Theater on the Bellarmine campus. 

     On Wednesday, October 22 at 7 p.m., the opening presentation will feature Belden C. Lane speaking on “Merton’s Hermitage and the Deconstruction of the Self: A Spatial Analysis.”  Dr. Lane is the Hotfelder Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University and the author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (1998) and Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (1988). 

     One week later, on October 29 at 7 p.m., Parker J. Palmer will speak on “Merton, Monasticism, and Our Work in the World.”   Dr. Palmer, writer, traveling teacher, and activist on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change, serves as Senior Associate of the American Association for Higher Education and as Senior Advisor to the Fetzer Institute; his books include Let Your Life Speak (1999), The Courage to Teach (1997), The Active Life (1990), To Know As We Are Known (1983), The Company of Strangers (1981), and The Promise of Paradox (1980), which features his essay “Thomas Merton: In the Belly of a Paradox.” 

     On Wednesday November 5 at 7 p.m., Elaine Prevallet, SL will speak on “Vulnerability: The Power of Choice and the Choice of Power.”  Now based in Santa Fe, NM, Dr. Prevallet is the former director of Knobs Haven Retreat Center at the Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, KY and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Loretto Heights College in Denver; a frequent contributor to Weavings, A Journal of Christian Spiritual Life, she is author of Interconnections (1985), and Reflections on Simplicity (1982) and of two booklets on ecological spirituality, A Wisdom for Life and In the Service of Life. 

     The final event of the anniversary celebration will take place on Saturday November 8 at 2 p.m., when Riffat Hassan and Paul Knitter will give a joint presentation on “Thomas Merton’s Dialogical Legacy: Accepting the Challenge.”  Dr. Hassan, Professor of Religious Studies and Humanities at the University of Louisville, is a writer, teacher, and activist; a pioneer of feminist theology in the context of the Islamic tradition, she has also been extensively involved in inter-religious dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims, with a particular focus on human rights in religious traditions.  Dr. Knitter, Emeritus Professor of Theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati, has written and spoken widely on religious pluralism and inter-religious dialogue; he is author of Jesus and the Other Names: Christian Mission and Global Responsibility (1996), One Earth Many Religions: Multi-faith Dialogue and Global Responsibility (1995), and No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions (1985).

     In connection with the anniversary, the Merton Center is also sponsoring an exhibit of Merton’s photographs entitled “The Paradox of Place: Thomas Merton’s Photography,” which will focus on the places Merton visited in his final travels of 1968, including California, Alaska and Asia, contrasted with his photographs of the Abbey of Gethsemani and his hermitage.  The exhibit will be held in the McGrath Art Gallery on the Bellarmine campus from October 10 through November 11, 2003.

    Canadian folksinger Ian Tyson is scheduled to present a concert on Thursday, June 5, 2003, the opening evening of the ITMS Eighth General Meeting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.  Perhaps best known as one half of the celebrated 1960s folk duo Ian and Sylvia, Tyson has gone on to a successful solo career as a musical interpreter of the Canadian west, culminating in the seminal Cowboyography collection, which reached platinum status in the mid-1990s.  His album Lost Herd won the 1999 Prairie Music Award for “Outstanding Country Recording.”  His most recent CD, Live at Longview, a collection of seventeen of his favorite songs, both classics and newer offerings, was recorded in October 2001 and released to the North American public in February 2002.         

     Speaking of his touring throughout North America, Tyson comments, “I like to surround myself with the most talented musicians, so that people not directly from the ranch culture can enjoy an evening with us through the music alone.  Everyone, it seems, can relate to a song like ‘Someday Soon’ and that’s the kind of communication I strive for.”  A recipient of the Order of Canada, Tyson lives with his wife and daughter on a ranch in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.  

     According to conference Site Coordinator Judith Hardcastle, Tyson is “a quintessential Canadian, whose love of nature dovetails perfectly with our conference theme, ‘The Hawk’s Dream: Thomas Merton’s Sacred Landscapes’.”  The concert will take place at 8:00 p.m. at the Frederick Wood Theatre on the UBC campus.

      On Sunday, June 8, 2003, as a special post-conference addition to the ITMS Eighth General Meeting, Professor Edward K. Kaplan, PhD, Kevy and Hortense Chair in the Humanities, and Chair of the Religious Studies Program at Brandeis University, will be speaking on Abraham Joshua Heschel, the subject of his prize-winning biography, Holiness in Words: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Poetics of Piety, and his relation to Thomas Merton.  Sponsored by Thomas Merton Society of Canada, Beth Israel Synagogue of Vancouver, and the Institute for the Humanities of Simon Fraser University, the lecture will take place at the synagogue, 4350 Oak Street, Vancouver, at 7:30 p.m.  The occasion will also mark the official publication of the volume Merton and Judaism, to be released this spring by Fons Vitae Publishing of Louisville. Edited by Beatrice Bruteau, the book contains the substance of the conference of the same name organized by Professor Kaplan and held in Louisville in the spring of 2002.  Copies of the Heschel biography and the new book will be available for purchase.  Refreshments will follow the lecture and book launch, and all are welcome.  For further information, contact Gaynor Levin (Beth Israel): 604-731-4161, or Donald Grayston (TMSC and IH/SFU): 604-291-5516; email: [email protected].

   Volume 15 of The Merton Annual is now available to ITMS members at the special price of $14.00, as part of membership benefits.  The issue includes the reprinting of Merton’s “Ox Mountain Parable of Meng Tzu,” introduced by Paul M Pearson; an interview by Fr. George Kilcourse with Br. Paul Quenon; articles by Claire Badaracco on Merton and the Beat Poets; Virginia Bear on Merton’s multilingualism; Leonard Biallas on Merton and Basho; John Collins on Merton and Walker Percy; Gray Matthews on Merton and communication; Allan McMillan on Merton and interfaith dialogue; Jeannine Mizingou on Robert Lax; Johan Seynnaeve on Merton’s “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano”; Lynn Szabo on Cables to the Ace; along with Victor Kramer’s bibliographical survey and reviews of six books.  Checks made out to “Orca Journals” should be sent to Mary Coyne, Orca Book Services, Stanley House, 3 Fleets Lane, Poole Dorset, UK BH15 3AJ.

     Peace activist Philip Berrigan, a Merton correspondent and friend, died of cancer on December 6, 2002 at Jonah House, the resistance community he founded with his wife Elizabeth McAlister in Baltimore.  Born in Two Harbors, MN on October 5, 1923, he grew up near Syracuse, NY, fought as an infantryman in the Second World War, and graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.  He entered the Josephite order, which was dedicated to pastoral work with African-Americans, and was ordained a priest in 1955, serving in New Orleans, at the Josephite seminary in Newburgh, NY, and at St. Peter Claver Parish in inner-city Baltimore, where his funeral would be held decades later. 

     He became an outspoken advocate of racial justice in the Church and in society, and participated in numerous civil rights demonstrations, including the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march with Dr. Martin Luther King.  His growing opposition to nuclear armaments and to the Vietnam conflict led to numerous acts of civil disobedience, beginning with pouring blood on draft records in Baltimore in October 1967; eight months later, with his brother, the Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, and seven others, he participated in the burning of draft records with homemade napalm at Catonsville, MD, one of the most widely publicized acts of resistance to the Vietnam War.  After conviction and briefly going underground he was imprisoned, the first Catholic priest in the history of the United States known to have served a sentence as a political prisoner. 

     In 1973 he left the priesthood and married Elizabeth McAlister, a fellow resister and former nun, with whom he had three children, Frida, Jerry and Kate.  Jonah House, which they founded in 1973, became a center for resistance to nuclear war and in particular for the Plowshares Movement, which took its name from the call of the prophet Isaiah to beat swords into plowshares.  On Sept. 9, 1980, Philip Berrigan, his brother Daniel, and six other activists, known as the Plowshares Eight, poured blood and hammered on Mark 12A warheads at the General Electric factory in King of Prussia, PA, the first of the Plowshares actions.  Berrigan participated in five additional Plowshares protests, resulting in seven years of imprisonment.  He eventually spent more than eleven years of his life incarcerated for civil resistance to war. 

     Philip Berrigan was a participant in the November 1964 retreat at Merton’s hermitage on the Spiritual Roots of Protest, and Merton wrote the Introduction for Berrigan’s first book, No More Strangers, published in April 1965.  Merton dedicated Faith and Violence to Jim Forest and Phil Berrigan.  Merton’s ambivalent response to the Catonsville action is found in his short article “Nonviolence Does Not . . . Cannot Mean Passivity,” first published in Ave Maria magazine in September 1968 and found as “Note for Ave Maria” in The Non-Violent Alternative and A Passion for Peace.  In a September 1968 letter, Philip Berrigan asking Merton to testify at the upcoming trial of the Catonsville Nine, but by that time Merton had embarked on his Asian journey, and in a September 30 letter to Berrigan included in The Hidden Ground of Love he explained he could not be present. 

     In addition to No More Strangers, which focused on racial justice, Philip Berrigan was the author of a number of other books, including A Punishment for Peace (1969), Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary (1970), Widen the Prison Gates: Writing from Jails, April, 1970-December, 1972 (1973), Time’s Discipline: The Eight Beatitudes and Nuclear Resistance (1989), written with his wife Elizabeth and brother Daniel, and his autobiography, Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996). 

     Shortly before his death, Berrigan stated, “I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family and the earth itself.”  In a tribute to her father at his funeral mass, celebrated by Daniel Berrigan, his daughter Kate said, “He was free in prison, and he showed us that freedom doesn’t have anything to do with where your body is or who holds the keys or who makes the rules.  It has everything to do with where your heart is.”

     Sr. Maria Emmanuel de Souza y Silva, OSB, Brazilian friend, correspondent and translator of Thomas Merton, died at the age of 90 on October 2, 2002 at her monastery in Petropolis, Brazil.  Born in Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of a Brazilian Navy officer, she was educated in schools in England and France as well as in her native country.  After a period doing social work in the Rio slums, she entered the Convent of the Virgin Mary in Petropolis, originally an independent enclosed contemplative community that joined the Benedictine Order in 1967. 

     Her extensive correspondence with Merton began with a letter requesting him to provide an English translation of the official prayer for the Brazilian Eucharistic Congress held that year;  Merton’s letters to her are found in The Hidden Ground of Love.  Sr. Maria Emmanuel was responsible for the translation of more than two dozen of Merton’s books into Portuguese, including Bread in the Wilderness, The Climate of Monastic Prayer, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Disputed Questions, The New Man, New Seeds of Contemplation, Seasons of Celebration, Thoughts in Solitude, and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, among others, and was the inspiration behind the formation of the Brazilian chapter of the ITMS.  She was the recipient of a “Louie” as the ITMS International award winner in 1997.  According to Waldecy Gonçalves, coordinator of the Brazilian ITMS Chapter, Sr. Maria Emmanuel was in good health and good spirits right up to the time of her death.

  British Merton biographer Monica Furlong died of cancer on January 14, 2003 at Umberleigh, Devon, three days short of her seventy-third birthday.  Born January 17, 1930 at Kenton, Middlesex, she worked as a secretary after leaving school and eventually became a journalist, writing for The Spectator, The Guardian and The Daily Mail among other publications.  After a difficult marriage of more than twenty years, she was divorced in 1977; she was the mother of a son and daughter and has several grandchildren. 

     Raised with no particular religious upbringing, she was drawn to the Church of England and Anglo-Catholicism in early adulthood.  From 1974 to 1978 she was a Producer in the Religious Department of the BBC, and was a frequent contributor to the British Catholic weekly The Tablet.  A strong supporter of the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, she was one of eight women ejected from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1980 for taking part in a silent protest on behalf of women’s ordination, which was approved by the Church of England twelve years later; she served as Moderator of the Movement for the Ordination of Women from 1982 through 1985 as well as a leader of the St. Hilda Community in London.  She became a widely published author in a number of different genres, including novels, biographies, travel, children’s books and religious books. 

     Merton: A Biography, first published in 1980 and reissued with a new preface in 1995, was the first extensive biography of the monk and attracted a good deal of attention.  Among her other books were With Love to the Church (1965), The End of Our Exploring (1973), Puritan’s Progress (1975), a biography of John Bunyan, Zen Effects (1986), a biography of Alan Watts, and Thérèse of Lisieux (1987).  Though she had been unable because of family circumstances to receive a university education, she later received honorary doctorates from Bristol University and the General Theological Seminary of New York.   

     Her friend Ruth McCurry wrote after her death, “Furlong stood in the proud Anglican tradition of women theologians and writers such as Dorothy Sayers and Rose Macaulay.  She shared with them a depth of catholic practice and original theological insight, a critical love for the Church and willingness to challenge it, as well as a private life which did not conform to everything the hierarchy wanted to regard as respectable.”

     A number of ITMS members have recently published books on various topics.

 Rusty Moe has recently published a new book of poetry entitled Where God Learns (Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press, 2002) [$11.95 pbk.], of which Br. Patrick Hart writes, “Out of contemplative silence, Rusty Moe’s incarnational poetry speaks to the heart.”

     ITMS Board member Basil Pennington, OCSO recently published Seeking His Mind: 40 Meetings with Christ (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2002) [$14.95 hbd.], a practical guide to “lectio divina,” praying with the scriptures.

     ITMS Board member Paul Quenon, OCSO has a new book of poetry, Laughter My Purgatory (Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press, 2003), which not only explores some aspects of the monastery, but also his childhood, and what led him to come to the Abbey of Gethsemani.

     Albert J. Raboteau has recently published A Sorrowful Joy (New York: Paulist, 2002) [$6.95 pbk.], his 2000 Harold M. Wit Lecture at Harvard Divinity School, in which he tells of his own spiritual journey, bringing his African-American and Roman Catholic heritage to Orthodox Christianity.  

   Rowan Williams, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the worldwide Anglican Communion, in July 2002, is among other accomplishments a scholar of the work of Thomas Merton.  Archbishop Williams was a major speaker at the Second General Conference of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland, held at Oakham School in March 1998; his presentation, entitled “New Words for God: Contemplation and Religious Writing,” is included in the proceedings of the conference, Thomas Merton: Poet, Monk, Prophet, published by Three Peaks Press.  He also has published “A Person that Nobody Knows: A Paradoxical Tribute to Thomas Merton” on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Merton’s death, in Cistercian Studies (1978) (reprinted in the Advent 2002 issue of The Merton Journal), and “Bread in the Wilderness: The Monastic Ideal in Thomas Merton and Paul Evdokimov” in One Yet Two: Monastic Traditions East and West (1976). 

     Born in 1950, Archbishop Williams studied at both Cambridge and Oxford and taught doctrine and ethics at both universities before becoming Anglican bishop of Monmouth, Wales.  He is a highly regarded theologian and historian of Christian spirituality.  His books include Christian Spirituality: A Theological History from the New Testament to Luther and St. John of the Cross (1979), Arius: History and Tradition (1987; rev. ed. 2001), Teresa of Avila (1991), Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (1994), A Ray of Darkness (1995), On Christian Theology (1999), Christ on Trial (2000) and Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (2000).  His most recent work, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (2002), is a meditation on the catastrophe, which he experienced  personally while preparing to speak that day at Trinity Church, two blocks from Ground Zero.

          The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia by William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen and Patrick F. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002) was named one of the fifty “Best Spiritual Books of 2002” by Spirituality and Health magazine.  In its citation the magazine called the Encyclopedia “the most valuable and definitive resource available on the life and work of this Trappist monk and Christian pathfinder.”  Spirituality and Health describes itself as a quarterly magazine “covering the people, practices, and ideas of today’s spiritual renaissance”; its website at www.SpiritualityHealth.com provides extensive resources for spiritual development.

     On December 6, 2002,  Jonathan Montaldo spoke at the annual dinner of the Monos Community in Tulsa, OK on “Going Home to Where I Have Never Been: Thomas Merton’s Inner Journey toward Joy.”

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     On December 9, 2002, the Thomas Merton Foundation sponsored a presentation entitled “Spirituality and Civil Rights” by civil rights activist, educator and author Dr. Vincent Harding at the Clifton Center in Louisville.  The talk initiated the foundation’s 2003 theme of Thomas Merton and Racial Justice.

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     On January 30, Fr. George Kilcourse presented the annual lecture in honor of Thomas Merton’s birthday in the undercroft of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville; the topic was “Revisiting Thomas Merton, Peacemaker: In the Shadows of Mideast War.”

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     On January 30, Malcolm Cash presented a talk on “Thomas Merton and the Black Experience” at the Community of Reconciliation in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center of Pittsburgh.

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     On January 31, Jonathan Montaldo gave a talk on “The Spirituality of Thomas Merton” and on February 1 led a Day of Reflection entitled “The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Pilgrimage through Themes in Thomas Merton’s Text” at St. Joan of Arc Roman Catholic Church in Boca Raton, Florida.  He also gave a presentation at the Newman Center of Lynn University on February 2nd.  Events were sponsored by the ITMS Boca Raton Chapter, coordinated by Fr. Martin Devereaux.

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     On February 23, the Manayunk Art Center in Philadelphia sponsored a program entitled “At Home with Oneself: Thomas Merton on Living and Learning.”  Presenters included Merton biographer Jennifer Bryant, who provided an overview of Merton’s life; Msgr. Michael Doyle, discussing the Merton icon written for his parish church in Camden, NJ; Fr. John McNamee, author of Diary of a City Priest, on Merton’s influence on his life; and Dr. Virginia Ratigan, on Merton’s influence on contemporary life.