Thomas Merton. Credit: Flickr/OnBeing. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
December 10 2018 was the 50th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton, the renowned Trappist spiritual writer who passed away in Thailand at the age of 53. Merton, who had seldom left his monastery - Our Lady of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky - was in Thailand for a an international conference of women and men monastics, but he had many ties to New York City, where coincidentally I was spending a sabbatical at Union Theological Seminary.
