Thomas Merton’s Key to Grace for an Impossible World

A Conversation with author Sophfronia Scott and Professor Alan Kolp

The Thomas Merton who lived as a contemplative monk studying, writing, and praying was also a man who could be impatient, rambunctious, charming, deceptive, in pain and in love. In other words, he was completely human and in the vulnerability of that messy humanity he most felt the grace of God. That humanity can take Merton beyond the realm of mystic/saint, making him more accessible to us so that through him we may learn how to reach for God in the midst of our own imperfections. Author Sophfronia Scott, in conversation with Professor Alan Kolp, considers this connection and, recognizing that so many of the issues of Merton’s time (race, peace, ambition, materialism, love) are, sometimes frustratingly so, still our issues today, will discuss how Merton’s work helps us to see through a lens of grace, allowing us to love the impossible world even as we seek to redeem it.

This conversation will be on Zoom.
Cost is $25

Be sure to check out Sophfronia Scott’s newest book,
The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton.

“In The Seeker and the Monk, Sophfronia Scott mines the extensive private journals of Thomas Merton, one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past, for guidance on how to live in fraught times.  Race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, love: with intimacy and a refusal to settle for cliché, Scott invites readers into the themes that occupied Merton and that still command our attention today.”

Sophfronia Scott grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a hometown she shares with author Toni Morrison. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She began her career as an award-winning magazine journalist for Time, where she co-authored the groundbreaking cover story “Twentysomething,” the first study identifying the demographic group known as Generation X, and People. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004 Sophfronia was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “potentially one of the best writers of her generation.”

Sophfronia’s other books include Unforgivable Love, Love’s Long Line, Doing Business By the Book, and This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, co-written with her son Tain. Her essays, short stories, and articles have appeared in numerous publications including Yankee Magazine, The Christian Century, North American Review, NewYorkTimes.com, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her essays “The Legs On Which I Move” and “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” are listed among the Notables in the Best American Essays series.

Sophfronia is the recipient of a 2020 Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.  She has taught at Regis University’s Mile High MFA and Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She’s also delivered craft talks and held workshops at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Meacham Writers’ Workshop, and the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. Currently Sophfronia is the founding director of Alma College’s MFA in Creative Writing, a low-residency graduate program based in Alma, Michigan. She lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut where she continues to fight a losing battle against the weeds in her flower beds.