Novitiate Conferences by Thomas Merton and Guests

Beginning in April 1962 Thomas Merton's lectures to the novices, and then later to the community, were recorded. All of the following recordings, over 700 conferences, totaling more than 400 hours, are housed in the archives of the Thomas Merton Center. The majority of recordings are by Thomas Merton with a small subset being recordings made by guests that Merton brought to lecture to his novices.

The recordings were originally made on reel-to-reel tapes. Through financial assistance from the Merton Legacy Trust all of the recordings have been remastered onto compact discs and are available to researchers and visitors of the Merton Center. A number of these recordings were made available through various publishers over the years. The first company to publish the recordings was Electronic Paperbacks. The project was continued by Credence Cassettes, formerly the audio tape division of the National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company. Publication continued under an independent company named Credence Communications until 2007.

A growing number of the recordings are currently available through Learn25. Unlike the earlier published recordings, the source material for the CD's and mp3's published by Now You Know uses the newly remastered recordings for improved quality. Use the links on the column to the right to navigate to a library catalog record corresponding to the published version of a talk by Merton.

The majority of the titles used were those assigned by the monks who recorded the conferences. Frequently Merton would cover a number of different topics so the titles are not always a good indication of the content of a particular tape. Some of the titles have been slightly amended.

*Those listed under "Published Link" as "MT-[number]" are available through the following subscription service: mertontalks.com.
*The following links under "Tape" are only available at the Thomas Merton Center.