With Roots in Eternity:
Merton, the Desert and the City

Guide to Opening Sessions

Session A - Thursday, June 9 - 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Session B - Thursday, June 9 - 3:30 PM -  4:30 PM

 THURSDAY, JUNE 9 - SESSION A

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

 A1. First-Timers Orientation I - Robert G. Grip                                                                            

 Robert G. Grip served as program chair for the ITMS Fifth General Meeting, and is news anchor at WALA television in Mobile, AL. He has served as chair of the ITMS membership committee and is currently President of the Society. 

This orientation session is designed for those attending their first ITMS meeting. The session will include a brief introduction to Thomas Merton, then consider the meeting theme and offer a preview of meeting events and sessions. The orientation is an opportunity to meet other first-timers. 

Nass Cannon – “Stand on Your Own Feet! Thomas Merton and the Monk without Vows or Walls.”

Nass is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine.

"From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet,” proclaimed Thomas Merton who believed this was “an extremely important monastic statement”.  He asserted that “the time for relying on structures has disappeared.”  This paper explores the notion of a monk who stands on his own feet without walls or vows. 

Mark Meade is the Assistant Director of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.

Andrea Neuhoff is a graduate student in the Religious Studies department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Are you interested in researching and publishing on Merton, but not sure where to begin?  Are you comfortable with print but unfamiliar with online resources?  Let a scholar and an archivist guide you from both perspectives. We will introduce participants to archival research. Participants will leave better equipped to navigate sources and get published.

     a. Eric Anglada - “‘Cities of the Dead’: Merton in Conversation with Primitivism.” 

Eric Anglada is a member of the New Hope Catholic Worker, an organic, communal farm outside of Dubuque, Iowa.

Thomas Merton was well-aware of our ecological crisis long before "being green" hit the mainstream.  My presentation will focus on his understanding and critique of the forces that have created that crisis, and what brought him close to a kind of primitivism that questioned many of the foundations of our urban, technological culture.   

Vanessa Wibberley is a graduate theology student at Xavier University.  She is interested in the re-presentation of Christian mysticism as a model for contemporary social analysis.

Thomas Merton and Edith Stein agree that the contemplative is one who understands the “dark night” as the way to apprehending the authenticity of Being, the truth in God, and the justice in Love.  And both denounce the “heresy of quietism,” as well as the material spirituality and individualism of the bourgeois.

    Hyeokil Kwon is a Presbyterian pastor and a Ph.D. student in Christian spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, C.A.

Thomas Merton, “a disciple of the Desert Fathers,” lived in a desert of emptiness, creativeness and compassion and embodied the life-giving teaching of the Fathers. His desert spirituality is a way of life in solitude that rejects sensual materialism and the herd mentality provided by modern human society. It helps contemporary city dwellers to make their city a desert.

THURSDAY, JUNE 9 - SESSION B

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Morgan Atkinson is a writer/producer based in Louisville, Kentucky. He has produced several programs examining the monastic life including, Gethsemani and a documentary examining the remarkable life of John Howard Griffin.

B2. ITMS Chapters Workshop - John E. King (Fayetteville, AR)                                                     

John E. King is Professor Emeritus of Social Work and Religious Studies at the University of Arkansas. He has presented at previous ITMS conferences, been published in the Merton Seasonal and leads retreats and days of recollection on Thomas Merton.

If you are interested in discovering what ITMS chapters are doing, locating a chapter near you, or learning how you might go about founding a chapter, attend this session.

Paul R. Dekar is Professor Emeritus of Evangelism/Mission, Memphis Theological Seminary, and author of Building Community on God’s Love: Thomas Merton and the New Monasticism (Eugene, 2011).

Gary Purdy is University Professor Emeritus and former Dean of Engineering, McMaster University; he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; one of ten Canadian Foreign Associates of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering; and holds a Doctorate “Honoris Causa” from Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (France).

Thomas Merton commented frequently on the impact of new technologies in cybernetics, weaponry, and tools used in every aspect of the western way of life. In this session, we explore Merton’s spirituality and monastic practices as these led him to become a prophetic critic of the role of the communication revolution in modernity, and an agent in social transformation.

 Don Grayston is a former president of the Thomas Merton Society of Canada, and of the ITMS. In January 2010 he visited Cuba for the second time, as resource person for a TMSC Merton pilgrimage.

 In 1940, Merton visits Cuba; in 1959, calls the revolution “inspiring”; and in 1962, in his Cold War Letters, expresses his concern about nuclear weapons and the Cuban-American missile crisis. We will review his interest in Cuba, and then consider his concept of “the Unspeakable” in Raids on the Unspeakable, and in James Douglass’s recent JFK and the Unspeakable.