The Thomas Keating Reader: Selected Writings from the Contemplative Outreach Newsletter

Thomas Keating

Jan 2012 · Lantern Books

About this ebook

For a quarter of a century, Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Keating has been contributing articles on Centering Prayer--the contemporary manifestation of the ancient Christian contemplative tradition--to the newsletter of Contemplative Outreach, the organization that he helped establish to promote this tradition.

The Thomas Keating Reader gathers for the first time thirty of those articles (some never published elsewhere) to offer a valuable overview of some of the main strands of Fr. Thomas' thinking and practice on Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, and interreligious dialogue. Rich with insight and humanity, The Thomas Keating Reader offers a broad introduction to the concepts that have animated Contemplative Outreach and reveals the gifts and challenges of the practice of the spiritual life.

About the author

The Rev. Thomas Keating was born Joseph Parker Kirlin Keating in Manhattan, New York on March 7, 1923. At the age of 5, he had a serious illness and made a bargain with God, that if he lived to be 21, then he would become a priest. He graduated from Fordham University in 1943. He expected to be drafted in World War II but received a deferment to enter the seminary. He was ordained a priest in 1949. He was the founder of the Snowmass Interreligious Conference and a member of the peace council. He was a pioneer in the worldwide Christian contemplative prayer movement and popularized centering prayer, a method of silent prayer that allows one to rest in the presence of God. He wrote more than 30 books and created various multimedia projects including Awakenings, Active Meditations for Contemplative Prayer, and Centering Prayer: A Training Course for Opening to the Presence of God. He died on October 25, 2018 at the age of 95.