Join Bart’s Books and Pacifica Graduate Institute’s David M. Odorisio for an evening centered on the work of Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton on Thursday, April 18 from 6 - 7 pm!
In May and October of 1968, Thomas Merton offered two extended conferences at Our Lady of the Redwoods Abbey, a Cistercian women’s community in Northern California. Comprising over twenty-six hours of previously unpublished material, Thomas Merton in California covers a variety of topics including ecology and consciousness, yoga and Hinduism, Native American ritual and rites of passage, Sufi spirituality, and inter-religious dialogue, along with extended discussions on prayer and the contemplative life.
The material presented in these talks reveals Merton’s wide-ranging intellectual and spiritual pursuits in the final year of his life, and fills a long-standing lacuna around Merton's visits to Redwoods Monastery, forming a necessary bridge to the Asian journey that was to come. Practical and applicable, as well as searching and inspired, Thomas Merton in California is essential for Merton readers and scholars, and all those interested in deepening their spiritual lives.
"With fresh, astute editing, Odorisio offers us a powerful entry into Merton's post-Vatican II thinking about human consciousness that reveals Merton's deep sense of play, spiritual honesty, and belief in the 'cosmic community of creatures.' These 1968 Redwood Conferences and letters to Mother Myriam Dardenne OCSO, that created an 'alleluia experience' for Merton are now, for the first time, available to contemporary readers. Promise yourself a thorough and engaging reading."
— Dr. Monica Weis SSJ, Professor Emerita of English, Nazareth University
"The young man who thought of himself as a contemplative in Greenwich Village now comes full circle after decades of monastic life to the crucible of contemporary culture and thought in northern California, not only with his dear friends at Redwoods Monastery, but in his jaunts into San Francisco, jazz clubs and Beat bookstores. The conferences contained here are more like conversations that Merton initiates, and you can almost hear the restless Trappist breathless with excitement about the future, particularly his own. To read Thomas Merton in California is more like listening in, not only to his dizzyingly wide-ranging erudition but on candid descriptions of his own daily life as a solitary that do well to shatter the romantic illusions of hermit life. A profoundly intimate and fascinating glimpse into one of the greatest minds and most important voices of the twentieth century."
— Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam, author of Prayer in the Cave of the Heart and Spirit, Soul, Body
David M. Odorisio, PhD, is associate core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. He received his MA in the History of Christian Spirituality from Saint John's University, School of Theology-Seminary, and his PhD in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. David is editor of Merton and Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart, and has published in numerous journals in the areas of psychology and religion, and the life and writings of Thomas Merton.