Raids on the Unspeakable

The rain has stopped. The afternoon sun slants through the pine trees: and how those useless needles smell in the clear air!
A dandelion, long out of season, has pushed itself into bloom between the smashed leaves of last summer’s day lilies. The valley resounds with the totally uninformative talk of creeks and wild water. Then the quails begin their sweet whistling in the wet bushes. Their noise is absolutely useless, and so is the delight I take in it. There is nothing I would rather hear………..because it is the voice of the present moment, the present festival.
Yet even here the earth shakes. Over at Fort Knox the Rhinoceros is having fun.

Raids of the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton.

Conference papers presented at the Ninth General Meeting of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland
held at Oakham School, Oakham from 13th - 15th April, 2012.

Various conference papers from the Ninth General Meeting were subsequently published in editions of The Merton Journal and other places.

Main Conference Addresses:

Liz Carmichael - "On the Compatability of Love and Sanity."

Jim Forest - "Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton."

Jonathan Montaldo - "To Uncage His Voice: Thomas Merton’s Inner Journey Toward Parrhesia."

Paul M. Pearson - The Donald Allchin Memorial Address - "Give Them Poetry, Poetry, Poetry."

Concurrent Session Papers:

Lars Adolfsson - "Loving the unbearable – Merton’s View on Personhood Facing Adolf Eichmann’s Moral Universe."

William Apel - "Reading Raids from a Biblical/Prophetic Perspective."

Nass Cannon - "The Time of the End is the Time of No Room .... is the Time of a New Creation .... and Room for All."

Peter Ellis - "O Fearful Meditation."

Fiona Gardner - "Towards an Understanding of Thomas Merton’s Ideas on Sanity and Spiritual Sanity."

Donald Grayston - "Merton and Cuba."

Gary Hall - "The Child in the Rain: Meditations on Innocence, Courage and Witness in Merton’s Raids."

Mairanne Hieb - "Noticing and Praying With the 'Nots' and 'However' in Merton’s 'Signatures: Notes on the Author's Drawings."

Elizabeth Holmes - "Thomas Merton’s Monastic Theology in the Context of His Interreligious Dialogues."

Daniel P. Horan, OFM - "Raids on the Impossible: The Poetics of Nonviolence in Merton, Caputo and Hauerwas."

Paul M. Pearson - "'Sentinels Upon the World's Frontier': Thomas Merton and Celtic Monasticism."

Gosia Poks - "The Importance of Not Being Serious: Thomas Merton's Comic Imagination with Continuing Reference to Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth."