Bellarmine University will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s birth with the Thomas Merton Centennial, a yearlong series of events that will bring a host of international writers, thinkers and artists to Louisville, beginning this month, a news release from the university said.
The first event, a lecture by Robert Ellsberg titled “To be a Saint: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and the Call to Holiness,” will draw upon Ellsberg’s experiences of working alongside Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker House. The event will take place Nov. 16 at 4 p.m. in the George G. Brown Center’s Frazier Hall.
On Nov. 17 a symposium in Frazier Hall will address the topic of “Thomas Merton & the Catholic Worker Tradition: 21st Century Practices of Compassion and ‘Works of Mercy.’”
Other featured lecturers during the next year include:
Sister Ilia Delio, director of Catholic studies and visiting professor at Georgetown University, will deliver a lecture titled “Beyond Dialogue: Christogenesis and Conscious Evolution.”
Dr. Charles Taylor, author of the The Secular Age, will deliver an address titled “After Christendom” May 23.
Jesuit Father Francis X. Clooney, director of the Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, will speak on “Thomas Merton and Hindu Wisdom: Knowing Self, Knowing Other” Nov. 9, 2015.
A full schedule of Thomas Merton Centennial events can be found at www.bellarmine.edu/merton-centennial. All events are free and open to the public; one dinner event requires the purchase of a meal.
For more information, email centennial director Father George Kilcourse, a professor of theology, at gkilcourse@bellarmine.edu.
