BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Contemplative Outreach Birmingham announces their 20th Annual Conference Saturday, March 9, 2013, at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Birmingham. Gray Matthews, Ph.D., a former ...

“The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation” by Thomas Merton (HarperSanFrancisco, $22.95, 170 pp.) The final work of one of Christianity’s foremost thinkers stands as a profound textbook on the ...

During his historic address to a joint session of Congress in 2015, Pope Francis raised up four virtuous Americans as models of citizenship: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day and ...

What about the life a monk could appeal to a woman who lived through the 20th century’s most significant events? Subjects like spirituality and the interior life remain elusive by nature, but Merton’s ...

Thomas Merton, the great twentieth-century American writer on spirituality, began his book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961, New Directions) with the suggestion that contemplation is, "The highest ...

When Selected Poems first appeared in 1959, Mark Van Doren wrote that Thomas Merton believed that “poetry at its best is contemplation—of things, and of what they signify.” At a time when poets are ...

(RNS) — You don’t always need classes run by Zen masters. Reading the right books at the right times can provide essential solace and guidance. (RNS) — These days, following my stroke, I’m trying to ...

Famed Trappist monk Thomas Merton corresponded with an extraordinary range of writers, among them Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Walker Percy and ...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (RNS) If the influential Catholic writer Thomas Merton were alive today, he would likely have strong words about police brutality and racial profiling. Back in 1963, Merton called the ...