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In 2019, Jonathan Montaldo interviewed Sr. M. Elena Malits, CSC. Sr. Elena passed away on March 10, 2022. She was professor emerita in Religious Studies at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, and was teaching a course on film to students at the time of recording in 2019. In the area of Thomas Merton studies, she is well-known for her book The Solitary Explorer: Thomas Merton's Transforming Journey. At the time of recording of the interview, the 2021 biennial conference of the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS) was planned for Saint Mary's College and titled, "Thou Inward Stranger." The 2021 conference was held online due to COVID-19. (The 2023 conference, "Sophia Comes Forth, Reaching," will be held at Saint Mary's June 22-25, 2023: merton.org/2023.)
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The recording is of a lecture by John Howard Griffin. The photograph of Griffin is by Fr. George Curtsinger.
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This is a conversation with Harold Talbott, moderated by Dr. Bonnie Thurston. The audio is taken from a video recording. It took place on December 7, 2000 in Louisville, KY, marking the 32nd anniversary of Merton's death. "Talbott shared with the audience details of his interaction with Merton in India, the differences between the Merton he had first met in 1958 and the man he encountered a decade later, and the significance of Merton's views on the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity" [container].
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Robert Ellsberg is the Publisher of Orbis Books and the author, most recently, of A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives. His other award-winning books include Blessed Among Us: Saintly Lives for Every Day, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, and The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. He served as managing editor of The Catholic Worker for two years during the last years of Dorothy Day, and he has dedicated himself to editing her work and promoting her mission. He has edited Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, and All the Way to Heaven: Selected Letters of Dorothy Day. In addition he has edited anthologies of Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, Flannery O’Connor, Charles de Foucauld, and Pope Francis. For the past four years he has written a daily entry on saints for Give Us This Day.
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Joseph Quinn Raab is professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Siena Heights University. He received a Ph. D. in theology from the University of St. Michael’s College, at the University of Toronto (2000). He is co-editor of The Merton Annual: Studies in Culture, Spirituality and Social Concerns.
Thomas Merton produced his most poignant social critiques in the nineteen sixties. With Foucault’s Madness and Civilization in 1961 and Hannah Arendt’s Eichman in Jerusalem in 1963, the problem of what madness means was in the public discourse. This paper explores the problem of “madness” in the final years of Merton’s life and considers their continued relevance in our own mad world.
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Kathleen Tarr is the author of We Are All Poets Here (2018). She earned her MFA at the University of Pittsburgh and serves on the board of the Alaska Humanities Forum.
In 1968, Merton spent 17 days in the land of tundra, glaciers, rain forests, and sacred and majestic mountains—Alaska. An intimate interpretation will be offered about Merton’s short, yet profound, sojourn north. New spiritual insights and physical details will deepen our understanding of this mostly overlooked aspect of Merton’s biography.
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An advocacy journalist who reports on the intersection of faith, politics, and culture, Rose Marie Berger is a senior associate editor and poetry editor for Sojourners magazine. She has traveled in several conflict zones to report on peacemaking and currently is active in the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a project of Pax Christi International, which formed in 2016 following a landmark April meeting in Rome on Catholics and nonviolence. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Religion News Service, U.S. Catholic, Huffington Post, The Merton Seasonal, as well as in the collections Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, Watershed Discipleship, Unsettling the Word, and Choosing Peace: The Catholic Church Returns to Gospel Nonviolence. She has most recently published her first poetry collection, Bending the Arch. A native of the West Coast, Rose was raised in the American River watershed, in traditional Miwok territory in California. For more than 30 years (and six presidential administrations), Rose has lived in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the Anacostia watershed, in traditional Piscataway territory.
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Ron Hansen is the author of screenplays, two collections of stories, a book of essays, and nine novels, the most recent being The Kid, which is based on the life of the outlaw William H. Bonney. Ron graduated from Creighton University in Omaha and went on to the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellow. His novel Atticus was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. Mariette in Ecstasy won the Gold Medal in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Ron’s writing has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University and a permanent deacon for the Diocese of San Jose.
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Mark C. Meade is the Assistant Director of the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, Kentucky, and 2017-2019 President of the International Thomas Merton Society. Since coming to the Merton Center in 2003, he has created online finding aids to the Merton Collection, which include a full index of over 20,000 letters and nearly 40,000 manuscripts and published materials by and about Merton. He has delivered lectures on Thomas Merton in the United States, England, and Argentina. His essays on Merton have been published in the United States and Spain. His satirical essay on Merton appears in We Are Already One: Thomas Merton’s Message of Hope. His poems, essays, and reviews have been published in The Merton Seasonal and The Merton Annual. Mark is active in the movement to abolish the death penalty in Kentucky. He has lectured and published papers on Merton's reflections on Albert Camus and both writers' opposition to the death penalty. He has contributed articles on visiting Kentucky's death row to Fellowship magazine and U.S. Catholic.
