Adam Bucko

Father Adam Bucko has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and the growing New Monastic movement. He has taught engaged contemplative spirituality in Europe and the United States, and has authored Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation and co-authored Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, and The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living.

Adam lives in New York with his wife, Kaira Jewel Lingo, a Buddhist teacher and former nun in the community of Thich Nhat Hanh. Together they lead The Buddhist-Christian Community for Meditation and Action.

VISIT WEBSITE

Cynthia Bourgeault

Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally acclaimed retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude in her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths. She is a faculty member emeritus of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the founding director of an international network of Wisdom schools, uniting classic Christian mystical and monastic teaching with contemporary practices of mindfulness and embodied presence. She has been honored as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2021.

VISIT WEBSITE

(1915-1968)

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton’s monastic commitment led him to develop mutually enriching relationships with spiritual traditions throughout the world.

He wrote in a letter to his Pakistani Muslim friend Abdul Aziz in 1960,

“The world we live in has become an awful void, a desecrated sanctuary, reflecting outwardly the emptiness and blindness of the hearts of people who have gone crazy with their love for money and power and with pride in their technology.”

From Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander (1968)

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion."

Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton

Visit Morgan Atkinson for films about Thomas Merton

VISIT WEBSITE

(1897 - 1980)

Dorothy Day

Dorothy is the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She became a Lay Benedictine in 1955 as her way of expressing the inspiration she experienced for the Desert Monastics and Celtic Monastics. She was in correspondence with Thomas Merton.

‘Dorothy Day: Don’t Call Me A Saint’ tells the story of the New York writer and Catholic anarchist who at the height of the Depression unwittingly created what would become a worldwide peace and social justice movement. The Catholic Worker persists to this day in over 180 houses of hospitality and soup kitchens across the United States, in Europe, Australia, Canada and Mexico. Their tenet is based on doing works of mercy and living in voluntary poverty with no attachments to Church or State’.

WATCH VIDEO