In the late 1960s, a young NCR reporter named Colman McCarthy saw the emerging decline of American Trappist monasteries and offered a diagnosis: The monastic life is not active enough. Looking back ...

In 2023, my wife Liz embarked on a self-guided spiritual retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Nelson County. She returned with an armful of books and souvenirs from the ...

"Solitude is not separation." So wrote the Trappist monk and peace-activist Thomas Merton in 1961, shortly before his own withdrawal to a hermitage on the grounds of the Abbey of Our Lady of ...

Thomas Merton’s autobiography was published in October 1948, but he had begun to write it in 1944, as he reveals in his journal. A day or so after Pearl Harbor, at age 26, he had journeyed as a ...

The author and monk Thomas Merton visited Alaska from Sept. 17 to Oct. 2, 1968. He was en route to Bangkok for a conference, where he died unexpectedly on Dec. 10. Credit: Thomas Merton Center / ...

Thomas Merton's hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Source: Bryan Sherwood/Wikimedia Commons This has been a rough year. The observation that the 2018 news cycle has been exhausting and infuriating ...