Thomas Merton
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Chasing What Is Known
What is known within me? I ask myself. What can I take home from this place, this encounter, this knowing amid all the unknown? Is our only real ground groundlessness? Is the only ground temporary ground?
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Allowing Ourselves to Unfold & The Freedom Found in Ritual
Everyone carries their own true self in their own way, in their own words, and in their own time. And that is also beautifully queer. My true self is the queer way I rest my ear to the chest of a tree, listening for its heartbeat.
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“One need not be a contemplative monk in a remote monastery to be overwhelmed by a sense of human inter-connection.”
Jim Forest was an activist and author, but more than anything he was a man of relationship and ritual. To know Jim was to know his family, his partner Nancy Forest-Flier, to feel his friendship, and to see the countless ways he saw and loved the world with great wonder. Jim looked and listened with…
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Maybe it’s time for me to let go of Thomas Merton
Today marks 53 years since Merton died in Bangkok, Thailand. I wrote the following article originally published by The Christian Century on December 6, 2021. “How can we be sure younger generations learn about Thomas Merton?” Every time I show Day of a Stranger, the documentary film I made about the Trappist monk, I’m asked some form of this question. Viewers…
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Solitude in a Toolshed
Although the hunt for more solitude was a pattern in Merton’s life, the sense of “arrival” was palpable for him in rat-infested toolshed
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Being A Truth Teller: A Conversation with Sophfronia Scott
An interview with author Sophfronia Scott, “If we can come to the table with what’s missing, only then can we find the possibility of completion.”
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“Now I will Disappear”
The fullness of liberation lies with the fullness of voices. And so long as I participate in perpetuating the domination of cis-white-male voices in spiritual leadership, I perpetuate slower movement toward the fullness of liberation for all people (shoutout to Womanist methodology).
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Zoom Diaries: A Week’s Lesson in Finding Voice
Last week, I had the opportunity to be with a group of friends from all over the country. With each of us in a different state, we gathered at 9 in the morning until about 5 each night to discuss what it means to find our call, know our voice, and live into the creativity…
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New Year, Same Past
There is the place in my life, paradoxically, where mystery is conceived and the best of myself is birthed. It never seems to be a place of great joy, but it is a place of great truth.
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The Absurd Vocation
“One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.” –Pauli Murray Coming off a week-long class on activism, organizing and social movements in Durham, North Carolina (and my first full year of seminary at CTS), I climb back into the quiet walls of a Kentucky monastery: Gethsemani Abbey. Here, the silence seeps into my bones like…
Dr. Cassidy Hall, DMin, MDiv, MTS, MA 