Thomas Merton’s mature monastic perspectives included his increasing openness to persons of other faith traditions that included Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. Through personal contacts and by correspondence, Merton practiced hospitality to experiences of faith by those seeking God in ways that might differ from but also complement his own Roman Catholicism. This volume explores Merton’s dialogues with Protestants, especially with Protestant seminary professors and their students from Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, who would visit him in his hermitage that had originally been built to house these interfaith dialogues. The volume displays Merton and his Protestant interlocutors at their ecumenical best, listening to one another in a communion marked by love and hope.

Prior to the Second Vatican Council Merton had begun dialoguing with other Christian denominations – Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian, and gradually expanding that dialogue further to include other faiths – Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. As a monk, rather than a theologian, Merton’s approach to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue was centered on the religious experience of others, rather than on the doctrinal expression of their traditions believing, as he wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, that I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further … If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.