The following is a plenary presentation from the 19th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society, Regis University, Denver, Colorado, delivered on June 21, 2025.

Estevan Rael-Gálvez is the director of Native Bound-Unbound, a Mellon Foundation sponsored digital humanities project centered on the millions of indigenous people whose lives were and have been shaped by enslavement. Dr. Rael-Gálvez, anthropologist, historian, and Indigenous slavery scholar, has served as the state historian of New Mexico, the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and senior vice president of historic sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He has participated in public history and digital history projects involving communities linked to Mt. Taylor, Girl Scouts USA, Santa Fe, and many other broad, vast and important projects in public memory and public storytelling and narrative-making.

The following is a plenary presentation from the 19th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society, Regis University, Denver, Colorado, delivered on June 20, 2025.

Susan Reynolds is a theologian and ethnographer whose first book, People Get Ready, received the 2024 Best Book Award by the College Theology Society.

Reynolds is an assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, GA, and is a contributing writer for Commonweal magazine. Originally from Denver, CO, she writes often on themes of ritual, community, and place.

This talk is about two men of the twentieth century, giants in their own right, the monk Thomas Merton and the Beat writer Jack Kerouac who as Roman Catholics studied Zen Buddhism. Both had a great deal common: Celtic ancestry, students at Columbia University, grounded in a spirituality of nature and a love of animals that reflected their respect for all sensate creatures. Both too had a dark side, prone to depression, struggling with sanity, even suicide at times. This talk discusses their similarities and differences, focusing upon their satori experiences, a Zen term for awakenings, epiphanies, enlightenment.

Ed Sellner, Ph.D., is professor emeritus in theology and spirituality at Saint Catherine University in St Paul, Minnesota, where he taught and administered programs for 35 years. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he is author of numerous books on Celtic spirituality, western and eastern monasticism, and animal theology. Ed is also a spiritual director, trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.