Please RSVP to our 

Ninth Annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality: Thomas Merton's Monastic Wisdom for These Times with Bonnie Thurston

Saturday, Feb 20 from 10 a.m. to noon. 
The link to this Zoom meeting will be emailed to you on Friday, Feb 19.

​Speaker: Bonnie Thurston - - Award-winning poet, author, retired Pittsburgh Theological Seminary William F. Orr professor, ordained minister, spiritual director and retreat leader.
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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.

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