农夫导航

The Thomas Merton Center

For more information visit the Merton Center website at .

The Thomas Merton Center in the W.L. Lyons Brown Library houses the world鈥檚 largest and most important archival collection of materials by and about Thomas Merton as well as 农夫导航鈥檚 archives and collections relating to Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  The Center is named after Thomas Merton, whose personal works and papers comprise the primary special collection in the Center and attract international scholars and visitors to the Bellarmine campus.

Thomas Merton (1915鈥�1968), known in religion as Father Louis, was a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky from December 10, 1941 until his accidental death in Bangkok, Thailand on December 10, 1968. He is internationally recognized for his religious profundity, for his dedication to his own Christian tradition, and for a sensitive openness to the problems of the world. His best-selling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) has become a classic of 20th century literature.  His other works, numbering over one hundred volumes, include poetry, meditations, a novel, a play and essays that address his wide-ranging interests. Among his most popular books are The Sign of Jonas, No Man is an Island, New Seeds of Contemplation, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Raids on the Unspeakable, The Way of Chuang Tzu, Mystics and Zen Masters, and Disputed Questions. Posthumous publications edited by others include The Asian Journal, The Collected Poems, The Literary Essays, Contemplation in a World of Action, and over ten volumes of his letters. His personal journals from 1939鈥�1968, closed for twenty-five years after his death, have been published in seven volumes.

Because of close, personal ties to faculty at Bellarmine, Merton agreed in 1963 to the establishment of a Merton Room in Bellarmine鈥檚 library. In 1967, a year before his death, he established the Merton Legacy Trust and named Bellarmine as the official repository for his manuscripts, letters, journals, audio-taped conferences, drawings, photographs, and memorabilia. Two years later, in October 1969, Bellarmine established the Thomas Merton Studies Center with the Merton Collection as its focal point.

The Thomas Merton Center exists to preserve the Thomas Merton Collection; develop international activities for scholars, students and the general public; and promote the spiritual, contemplative, and humanistic values central to Thomas Merton as reflected in his life and writings. Merton was, as Pope Francis said to the U.S. Congress on September 24, 2015, 鈥渁 man of prayer; a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.鈥�  The Merton Center thus serves as an international resource for scholarship and inquiry on Merton and his values; contemplative and prayerful living, ecumenism, peaceful international relations, social justice, the spiritual nature of the arts, personal and corporate inner work, and interdisciplinary approaches to human problems. The Center regularly sponsors courses, lectures, retreats, seminars, Road Scholar Programs, and exhibits that promote these themes.

The International Thomas Merton Society was founded in 1987 with its headquarters at Bellarmine鈥檚 Merton Center. In conjunction with the ITMS, the Merton Center publishes The Merton Seasonal, which celebrated its fortieth year of publication in the year 2015. The Center and the ITMS additionally support publication of Merton and Merton-related scholarship in the Merton Annual. The Center is affiliated with international Merton Centers such as the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the Merton Association at Prades, France (Merton鈥檚 birthplace), the Centro Internacional de Estudios Misticos in Avila, Spain, The Polish Merton Society in Krakow, and the Russian Merton Society in Moscow.

The Merton Center, as the official repository of Merton鈥檚 estate, has grown to over fifty thousand items that include his literary papers, nine hundred drawings, fourteen hundred photographs, seven hundred hours of audio-taped conferences to his monastic community, published works by and about Merton, and several hundred volumes from Merton鈥檚 own library. It is the largest collection in the world, incorporating works translated into over thirty languages, more than four hundred doctoral dissertations and masters theses, and a growing collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and fabric art depicting Merton, as well as the largest public collection in the United States of watercolors by Merton鈥檚 New Zealand-born father, Owen Merton. 

The Merton Center is located on the second floor of Bellarmine鈥檚 W.L. Lyons Brown Library. The Center includes areas for study, meeting, quiet reflection, and offices for staff.