Ryan Bell - Pilgrims in a Polarized Church: Thomas Merton and Raymond Hunthausen

JUDITH VALENTE - In Their Own Words: The Monks Who Knew Merton. There are only a few remaining monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani who knew Thomas Merton personally. One is now 103 years old.  ITMS President (2023-2025) Judith Valente spent time  interviewing those monks about their encounters with Merton. Their memories are vivid and entertaining. Not surprisingly, Merton remains a complex figure for many of them.  They talk frankly about his relationship with M. and his fierce opposition to the abbey's mail order businesses, but also his ability to relate to struggling monks, his humor, and his capacity to admit a mistake. The monks also share memories of those fateful days after Merton's body was returned from Bangkok and his brothers had to bring him to his final rest. Judith Valente worked as a staff writer for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and as an on-air correspondent for national PBS-TV, Chicago Public Radio and GLT Radio, the National Public Radio affiliate in central Illinois where she lives. She is the author of three collections of poetry and six spirituality books, including How to Live: What The Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us about Happiness, Meaning and Community, and The Art of Pausing: Meditations for the Overworked and Overwhelmed and How to Be: A Monk & A Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Friendship & Forgiveness, the latter two co-authored with Brother Paul Quenon of the Abbey of Gethsemani. She guides retreats around the country on how to live a more contemplative life in the secular world and leads an annual Benedictine Footprints contemplative, cultural, culinary pilgrimage/retreat in Italy, which offers a "slow tourism" experience of  Italian life and lesser-known Benedictine sites. Her latest book is The Italian Soul: How To Savor the Full Joys of Life, based on what she has learned from her many stays in Italy about living more joyfully and mindfully.   

In the nineteen sixties, finding a cloistered monk in Protestant spaces was unexpected. We will look at Merton's influence in Protestant culture, then extend our exploration into other unexpected and marginal places, including punk and hardcore engagements with Merton, and imagining Merton as an urban character. Viewing Merton through an alternative lens can encourage us to see Merton reaching further than we might expect or even be comfortable with. Harley Dean Mathews is associate pastor of First United Methodist Church in Victoria, Texas. Harley is married to Amanda Mathews, an artist. Harley has a background in multi-faith dialogue, mysticism, nonviolence, creative contemplation and the underground music scene. See future programs and register to join the discussion live at: https://merton.org/twm/

In the fifty years since Dr. Raymond Moody’s 1975 landmark publication, Life After Life, modern research into the phenomena of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and related studies in consciousness have flourished. Among the cross-disciplinary approaches to this burgeoning field, there is an unnamed question emerging: At what point do we shift from an emphasis on seeking scientific evidence in support of the veracity of NDEs to an exploration of whether NDEs might themselves contribute to a deeper understanding of perennial spiritual experience? While clearly this will not be a uniform development across disciplines, my presentation seeks to make this leap by exploring Thomas Merton’s breathtaking description of the quietud sabrosa (“delicious tranquility”) in light of NDEs. (Cf. New Seeds of Contemplation, Chpt. 38: “Pure Love,” 275-289). Indeed, much of what Merton describes here has an uncanny resonance with reports by some who have had remembered experiences during their time of clinical death. I will suggest then, that the model of consciousness (namely, “Idealism”) that best supports the phenomena of NDEs might likewise be marshalled to provide deeper insights into what is unfolding interiorly in experiences of infused contemplation such as Merton describes as a quietud sabrosa. Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D. is Professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Mysticism in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as Vicar of St. Columba's Episcopal Church and Contemplative Center in Inverness, CA. Working for the advancement of contemplative Christianity, he has reinvigorated the mission and ministry of St. Columba’s through the introduction of contemplative eucharistic liturgies, contemplative residency programs, online courses, directed retreats, sermon podcasts, and an online blog, among other initiatives. In 2018 he published his second book, Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life, with Liturgical Press, released in Spanish, Contemplar a Cristo: Los Evangelios y la vida interior, in January 2022 by Desclée de Brouwer. A Chinese translation is underway with Kuang Chi Culture, Taiwan. He is currently working on his next book project on studies in consciousness and Christian Spirituality.

In this presentation, Ryan Bell explores how Thomas Merton had a profound influence on the life of Raymond Hunthausen, the high-profile, boundary-pushing Archbishop of Seattle from 1975 to 1991. While the two scions of the post-Vatican II American Catholic Church never met, Merton’s writings on peace and justice spurred Hunthausen to begin a series of headline- grabbing protests against nuclear arms, racism, and sexism. Ryan outlines how Merton’s influence on Hunthausen turned the archbishop into a modern prophet within an increasingly polarized American Catholic Church. Ryan Bell is a recent graduate of the University of Denver and a professed Benedictine Oblate at Benet Hill Monastery in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was a Daggy Scholar at the 2023 ITMS meeting at St. Mary’s College.

The following is a plenary presentation from the 19th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society, Regis University, Denver, Colorado, delivered on June 21, 2025. Estevan Rael-Gálvez is the director of Native Bound-Unbound, a Mellon Foundation sponsored digital humanities project centered on the millions of indigenous people whose lives were and have been shaped by enslavement. Dr. Rael-Gálvez, anthropologist, historian, and Indigenous slavery scholar, has served as the state historian of New Mexico, the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and senior vice president of historic sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He has participated in public history and digital history projects involving communities linked to Mt. Taylor, Girl Scouts USA, Santa Fe, and many other broad, vast and important projects in public memory and public storytelling and narrative-making.

The following is a plenary presentation from the 19th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society, Regis University, Denver, Colorado, delivered on June 20, 2025.   Susan Reynolds is a theologian and ethnographer whose first book, People Get Ready, received the 2024 Best Book Award by the College Theology Society.     Reynolds is an assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, GA, and is a contributing writer for Commonweal magazine. Originally from Denver, CO, she writes often on themes of ritual, community, and place.        

  This talk is about two men of the twentieth century, giants in their own right, the monk Thomas Merton and the Beat writer Jack Kerouac who as Roman Catholics studied Zen Buddhism. Both had a great deal common: Celtic ancestry, students at Columbia University, grounded in a spirituality of nature and a love of animals that reflected their respect for all sensate creatures. Both too had a dark side, prone to depression, struggling with sanity, even suicide at times. This talk discusses their similarities and differences, focusing upon their satori experiences, a Zen term for awakenings, epiphanies, enlightenment.   Ed Sellner, Ph.D., is professor emeritus in theology and spirituality at Saint Catherine University in St Paul, Minnesota, where he taught and administered programs for 35 years. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he is author of numerous books on Celtic spirituality, western and eastern monasticism, and animal theology. Ed is also a spiritual director, trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.

Becky McIntyre and Sarah Fuller discuss their art and experiences as artists working in religious and social justice movements, particularly the Catholic Worker movement. They will discuss intersections of faith, resistance, creativity and justice in their own life histories and artistic practices. They discuss examples of their art, and discuss ways in which the art and work of Thomas Merton touches on their own artistic practices.   Becky McIntyre is a community artist, printmaker, and muralist in Philadelphia, currently living as an artist in residence at St. Raphaela Center in Haverford, PA. She regularly creates the cover art for the Los Angeles Catholic Worker newspaper, is a community muralist who worked as Chief of Operations, project manager, and artist for Walls for Justice, and is the visual artist for the Synodality in Catholic Higher Education in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (SCHEAP) project. Her website is www.sanaartista.com. Sarah Fuller is a printmaker in Ventura, California, who creates art for the Catholic Worker movement.  She was an Artist in Residence at the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute in 2023. She has had art published in magazines, books, and Catholic Worker newsletters and newspapers. Her most recent book illustration project was for The Anabaptist Community Bible project with MennoMedia. Her website is www.sarahfullerart.com.

Annual Fourth & Walnut Lecture, 2025 with James Finley Being A Healing Presence in a Wounded & Traumatized World James Finley Ph.D. lived as a monk at the cloistered Trappist monastery of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where the world-renowned monk and author, Thomas Merton, was his spiritual director.   James Finley leads retreats and workshops throughout the United States and Canada, attracting men and women from all religious traditions who seek to live a contemplative way of life in the midst of today's busy world. He is also a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. James Finley is the author of: The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation, Merton's Palace of Nowhere, The Contemplative Heart and Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God.

In this presentation to celebrate the launch of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence in Rome in September 2024, Sojourners senior editor Rose Marie Berger reflects on what led up to the launch of the Institute, what moral and theological questions top the Institute's research agenda, and what comes next for this tremendous new resource available to the global Church and beyond. Merton's own thinking and prayer on war and peace opened the way for the maturing of Catholic nonviolence as it is understood today. The launch of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence is another dynamic experiment in Merton's thoughts on how the Church's "wars are fought without any weapons at all." Rose Marie Berger is a Catholic peace activist and poet. She is senior editor at Sojourners magazine, an ecumenical Christian magazine promoting faith and social justice, where she has worked since 1986. Rose’s work in Christian nonviolence has taken her to conflict zones around the world. She is active in the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a project of Pax Christi International, and served as co-editor for Advancing Nonviolence and Just Peace in the Church and the World, the fruit of a multiyear, global, participatory process to deepen Catholic understanding of and commitment to Gospel nonviolence. She serves on the board of The International Thomas Merton Society.