Thomas Merton Center

The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University (Louisville, Kentucky) was founded in October 1969 after the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton made Bellarmine the repository of his manuscripts, letters, journals, tapes, drawings, photographs, and memorabilia. The Center functions as a central resource—nationally and internationally—for research and continued scholarship on Merton and the ideas he espoused: the contemplative life, spirituality, ecumenism, understanding between East and West, peace, and social justice. The Merton Center offers courses and seminars, arranges for retreats, and provides access to its resources to the general public and scholars alike. Besides the collections of manuscripts and published works, the Center holds and displays examples of its namesake's artwork, as well as the work of his father, the artist and New Zealand native Owen Merton. The International Thomas Merton Society (founded in 1987) has its home in the Center, where it publishes The Merton Seasonal (a quarterly) and The Merton Annual. The Society is affiliated with the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Winchester, England, established in 1993), which publishes the semiannual Merton Journal.

The life's work of Thomas Merton (1915–68) has long inspired admiration and emulation among a wide range of readers, thinkers, and advocates of religious inquiry, world peace, and social justice. “Father Louis” (from his ordained name) entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky on December 10, 1941, after his studies of languages and literature in Europe and at Columbia University. Through some of the most uncertain years in the 20th century, Merton devoted himself to a life of contemplation and wrote prolifically about the connections between the divine spirit and the human condition. While taking part in a world religious conference in Bangkok, Thailand, he died by accident on December 10, 1968—27 years to the day after taking his monastic vows. His immensely popular autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) remains in print; it has been widely translated and is the best-known single work among his prodigious writings.

In November 1963, some four years before he made arrangements to place his manuscripts in the library at Bellarmine University, Merton acknowledged that many of his writings had by then expanded beyond the contemplative or purely spiritual, but voiced a wish to avoid being considered only an “inspirational” writer. In addressing such issues as interracial justice and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example, he hoped to connect those concerns to his belief in the basic truth that all humankind should aspire to live in peace. It was this belief that inspired the establishment of the Thomas Merton Center as an institution of active scholarship and involvement in public affairs.

The activities of another Thomas Merton Center (TMC), established in 1972 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, similarly derive their inspiration from the example of Merton's advocacy for peace and social justice. Founder Larry Kessler, TMC's staff, and its many adherents have represented a broad range of religions and philosophies, and their myriad protests, fasts, and vigils have focused on such issues as the war in Vietnam, hunger, militarism throughout the world, apartheid and other forms of racial discrimination, exploitation of workers, and the many root causes of poverty. TMC has offered seminars on nonviolence, the contemplative life, and the pursuit of simplicity in modern human existence, and it has sponsored delegations to trouble spots such as Nicaragua and El Salvador while maintaining contact with events of social import in Haiti and Mexico in more recent years. Though many of its efforts are regional in scope, its international influence is evident, and TMC extends word of its interests and activities by means of its monthly newsletter, The New People.

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