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  "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.
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  “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.
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  "Thomas Merton's MY ARGUMENT WITH THE GESTAPO:" ITMS Sixteenth General Meeting at Santa Clara University in California, June 27, 2019, by Ron Hansen.

  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.