Thomas Merton's Monastic Wisdom for These Times
Bonnie Thurston
Saturday February 20, 2021
10:00 a.m. - Noon    Symposium

Click here for the program and recommended reading
Click here to watch on YouTube

Location: Zoom - Event log-in information will be emailed prior to the Symposium; Please email info@benedictfriend.org with your name and preferred email address to register.

Speaker: Bonnie Thurston - - Award-winning poet, author, retired Pittsburgh Theological Seminary William F. Orr professor, ordained minister, spiritual director and retreat leader.
​
Bonnie Thurston has delved deeply into the work and life example of Thomas Merton.   She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Thomas Merton, and is particularly interested in his poetry and in his inter-religious thought.  She was a founding member of the International Thomas Merton Society, served as its third president, and received a "Louie" award for service to the Society.  She has written over fifty articles or contributions to books on Merton, and has led retreats and lectured on Merton widely in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Europe.  She edited Thomas Merton and Buddhism (Fons Vitae Press, 2007), Hidden in the Same Mystery: Thomas Merton & Loretto (Fons Vitae, 2010), and Thomas Merton on Eastern Meditation (New Directions, 2012).  In 2020, her latest work, Shaped by the End You Live For: Thomas Merton's Monastic Spirituality, was published by Liturgical Press.  Her work on Merton has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

Thomas Merton is a figure we invoke because he is a contemplative monk and an engaged and often prophetic voice for tumultuous times.  His understanding of wisdom is that it is the quality that helps us resolve "the apparent opposition" of action and contemplation, of involvement and detachment.  Merton rails against the "senseless, wasteful" neglect of our own being.  We need his wisdom today.


Please join us!  To register, email info@benedictfriend.org with your name and preferred email address.

The Friends of Saint Benedict is an ecumenical, non-profit organization that organizes pilgrimages, lectures and study groups

to make the wisdom and practice of St. Benedict accessible and useful to modern men and women. 
The Annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality offers insights from monastics and scholars, in an atmosphere of discourse, hospitality and community.

Tools for Life, Monastic and WorldlySaturday February 1, 2020
9:30 a.m. Check in;    10:00 a.m. Symposium;   Lunch to follow.
Location: The Washington National Cathedral, Perry Auditorium
3101 Wisconsin Ave., NW; Washington, DC  20016
 Speaker: Fr. Eric Hollas, O.S.B., Saint John's Abbey
​
Fr. Eric Hollas, a monk at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota whose monastic life began fifty years ago, serves as deputy to the President for Advancement at Saint John's University.  Trained in medieval studies at Yale, Fr. Eric has had a distinguished career as an educator, administrator, and chaplain, spearheading the commissioning of calligrapher Donald Jackson to create the breathtaking St. John's Bible, an illuminated Bible for the 21st century that has been exhibited at the Library of Congress and around the country.
A traveler through time and territory, Fr. Eric is an astute and reverent observer of life, seeing human aspirations and foibles through the lens of the 1500-year-old Benedictine Rule.  His weekly blog, A Monk's Chronicle (https://monkschronicle.wordpress.com), offers a mix of scholarly, spiritual and practical insights - - appropriate to any disciple of Benedict, the saintly humanist who understood so deeply the pitfalls and possibilities of human communities.  Here are a few Fr. Eric gems:
"What if by choosing to book passage on the ship of the self-absorbed, we actually miss the better boat - - the boat that sails to a full and loving life?"
"Opportunism looks for the encounter with God at every turn."
"It might be helpful to think of our gifts and talents as a challenge grant from God."
 "We approach the altar of the Lord to confess our sins.  So, if by chance this afternoon you are coming to confess someone else's sins, please don't."

The Seventh Annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality will explore the Saint Benedict of Dante’s
poetic vision. Professor Hawkins writes and speaks on a range of literary and scholarly topics, reaching broad audiences beyond the academic community.
 
Peter Hawkins, our keynote speaker, is Professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. His writing and teaching have long been focused on Dante. His books include Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (1999), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), Dante, a Brief History (2006), and Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). Chapters on the poet can be found in Dante in Context, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Arts, MLA Approaches to Teaching the “Divine Comedy,” and Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s “Commedia.” He has also published on religious themes in American fiction, most recently in The Bible and the American Short Story (2018), written with Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg.
 
The Friends of St. Benedict offer a yearly symposium on Benedictine Spirituality including lectures, discussions and community gatherings bringing together lay people, monastics, and scholars to explore the ways that Benedictine wisdom can reshape our relationships with God and with our neighbors.

More information and register here.

August 26- September 1, 2018
 
"To quicken a festival in the innermost heart"
 
These words come from Roger Schütz, popularly known as Brother Roger, the Swiss monastic who in 1940 founded the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastic community in Burgundy, France, and served as its first prior until his death in 2005. 
 
Brother Stuart, of Mucknell Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine monastery in Worcestershire, will lead the 2018 Canterbury pilgrimage, structuring a series of meditations and discussions around Brother Roger's intuition of a new beginning. Brother Roger envisioned  "a springtime for the church,  a Church devoid of means of power, ready to share with all; a place of visible communion for all humanity."
 
Of course, if it is to be a true springtime, it can only come after a winter, which entails a stripping away to what is essential.
 
Brother Stuart's sessions exploring this vision and its meaning for each of us will fit within the rhythms of Canterbury Cathedral, a universal place of pilgrimage. Participants will live the daily cycle of prayer at the cathedral, from Matins to Evensong, while honoring the Benedictine framework by including times each day for manual work, study, silence and community.
 
A Benedictine Experience is neither a silent retreat, nor a seminar, though it contains elements of both. It is a time to step back, but also a time to step into an ancient rhythm, living within a framework that has for 1500 years fostered balance and sanity in times of turmoil.
 
Mucknell Abbey is made up of professed monks and nuns, novices, and 'alongsiders', who live with the community, perhaps to explore a possible monastic vocation or simply to experience the monastic life for a time.  
A large part of the ethos of the community is ecological sustainability.
More information and registration.

Friends of St. Benedict's Sixth Annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality
The Monastery as a Work of Art
Exploring the Nature of Creativity and Grace
 
November 10 – 11, 2017
 
The Sixth Annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality will focus on creativity as a basic part of the Divine Nature and a defining characteristic of being human. While central to artistic expression, creativity is also critical in forming community, building fruitful relationships and shaping a nourishing experience of solitude.
 
Brother Mark Brown, our keynote speaker, is a monk, retreat leader, and priest, serving at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "I would like to explore the origins of the creative impulse," he says, "especially as it is expressed in the most ordinary ways in community, and along the way, offer a more expansive vision of the 'grace upon grace', as John 1 puts it."
 
Expanding the discussion are two distinguished panelists:
 
Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt is a teacher, poet and spiritual director in the Washington, DC area. Her courses, offered at Wesley Theological Seminary and Virginia Theological Seminary, often focus on connections between literature, theology and spiritual practices. Her poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in Christianity and Literature, Cross Currents, Sewanee Theological Review, Living Prayer, The Anglican Theological Review, Ruminate, Spiritus, and Presence. She is the author of At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics, as well as three volumes of poetry: Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture, Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life, and Good Places.
 
Patricia Wudel since 1998 has been the Executive Director of Joseph's House, which offers end-of life care and hospitality to homeless men and women with advanced HIV disease or terminal cancer. A graduate of the Metta Institute’s End-of-Life Practitioner Program, she is described by a colleague as knowing "the ability of beauty to heal all of us."
 
Friday, November 10 - - 7:00 p.m. Lecture, 8:15 p.m. Reception
Saturday, November 11 - - 10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Workshop
Location: St. Alban’s Episcopal Church; Washington, DC  20016
 
Symposium Registration:

To reserve a place, please click HERE

or send a check to the Friends of St. Benedict at
            5150 Macomb St., NW; Washington, DC  20016

Friday and Saturday…... $50
Friday Only…………........  $40
Saturday Only……….....… $20
Students, Low Income.…$10
Lead Supporters……...…$200

The annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality was a generous time of thoughtful and engaging conversation on the topic of "Benedictine wisdom and sacred humanitas" .  We were blessed to have Sr. Donald leading us, and to have three panelists (Kristina Olsen, Kathleen Staudt, and Tim Kelly) bringing their breadth of life experience and scholarship to bear.

We are grateful for all those volunteers and donors who made this spirited event possible!  We look forward to our next Symposium in the autumn of 2017.

We expect to have complete video recordings of both Friday night's lecture and the Saturday morning talk and discussions available on our website within two weeks.  The recordings are made possible by the family and friends who contributed to the Elilzabeth Swenson Memorial Fund, honoring the life work of our founding Director.
 

Our new site has been made possible by the contributions made to the Betty Swenson Memorial Fund. Thank you!