Communing with the stranger: relational dynamics and critical distance between Thomas Merton and his readers

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Hall, Gary Peter (2019). Communing with the stranger: relational dynamics and critical distance between Thomas Merton and his readers. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Merton’s monastic vocation was, amongst other things, a constructive response to perceived socio-political crisis. His writing and other works are, in the main, expression and extension of that overarching monastic practice, a movement from one socio-cultural location to another, then a persistent struggle to remain faithfully attentive and responsive to an approaching and present Christ. By remaining a monk and publishing into the milieu from which he departed, Merton’s monastic witness became a form of public action which establishes an irreducible, creative tension for sympathetic readers who do not make an equivalent move. Combined with the interpersonal aspect of his writing, the tension is experienced as a type of relational dialectic. Merton’s distinctive contribution to present-day theological discourse and faith praxis is bound up with this dialectic which extends from his sustained communicative action in the face of critical social conditions, rather than being found in attempts to systematize his ‘scattered’ theology or to distil propositional content from a multifaceted and fragmentary body of work. Interpretations of the trajectory of his life which imply that, at some point or in some way, Merton reversed or softened his secession from mainstream society by ‘returning to the world’ can undermine the capacity of the corpus to hold readers in the creatively expectant tension characteristic of Merton’s historical witness and, more broadly, of openness to eschatological strands of a biblical counter-narrative of prophets, psalmody and Gospel that Merton mediates.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):