Items

• Fr. Flavian Burns, O.C.S.O., Presentation on Dan Walsh, August 28, 1976.
• In Commemoration of Thomas Merton's 60th Birthday, January 31, 1975.
• John Howard Griffin, Question and Answer session for "The Meaning of Thomas Merton," Oberlin College, Ohio, recorded November 13, 1972, Merton Festival of Northern Ohio.
• Sr. Elena Malits, CSC, a 2019 interview by Jonathan Montaldo
  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.)
• John Howard Griffin, "The Meaning of Thomas Merton," Oberlin College, Ohio, recorded November 13, 1972, Merton Festival of Northern Ohio.
  The recording is of a lecture by John Howard Griffin. The photograph of Griffin is by Fr. George Curtsinger.
• The (Almost) Final days of Thomas Merton: a conversation with Harold Talbott with an interview conducted by Bonnie B. Thurston.
  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].
• "The Gate of Heaven Is Everywhere"—ITMS Sixteenth General Meeting at Santa Clara University in California, June 28, 2019, by Robert Ellsberg.
  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.
• "Madness and Meaning: Thomas Merton and the Sixties"—ITMS Sixteenth General Meeting at Santa Clara University in California, June 27, 2019, by Joseph Quinn Raab.
  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.
• “From the Inner Frontier to the Last Frontier: Thomas Merton’s 1968 Alaska Journey"—ITMS Sixteenth General Meeting at Santa Clara University in California, June 27, 2019, by Kathleen Tarr.
  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.
• "Direct Transmission of Faith"—ITMS Sixteenth General Meeting at Santa Clara University in California, June 28, 2019, by Rose Marie Berger.
  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.