Description: What if we truly belong to each other? What if we are all walking around shining like the sun?
Mystic, monk, and activist Thomas Merton asked those questions in the twentieth century. Writer Sophfronia Scott is asking them today. In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times. As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it? By engaging in this lively discourse, listeners will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within--and even to love--this despairing and radiant world.Brief description: Kellye A. Saunders is a professor of dance at Texas Christian University. As a classically trained ballerina, Ms. Saunders has performed on the most famous stages in the world as well as on Broadway. At home both onstage and behind the microphone, she employs her artistic sensibility, as well as a keen attention to detail to every project to which she is entrusted. A native of Washington DC, she now resides in Ft. Worth, Texas.