An in-depth study of Thomas Merton's prescient insight into the social and spiritual transformations needed to heal the wounds of our globalized society.

This book examines key personal exchanges that explore dismantling racial oppression of African Americans and Indigenous Peoples, advocating for peace in a nuclear era, and re-calibrating the technological domination of nature and human freedom that impairs life on our planet.

Merton's wisdom and understanding of the distorted priorities that underlie these concerns -- which transcend both his time and ours -- emerge from these letters. They offer us hope to act for a better world, despite the discouraging realities we face.

Signs of Hope was written for anyone wishing to reflect on or advocate for social transformation in precarious times.
 ENDORSEMENTS FOR SIGNS of HOPE
The best researched book in amiable prose and most relevant exposition in years about Thomas Merton, Signs of Hope re-examines the monk's personal commitments to fellow advocates for social justice, ecology, and nonviolence. Oyer's detailed review of Merton's personal letters that transcend conflicting perspectives on racial justice is ground-breaking!
    --Jonathan Montaldo
        Bridges to Contemplative Living
             with Thomas Merton

Oyer offers a "peace and social justice movement history through epistolary" that puts Merton's correspondence in critical conversation with our fraught times--and thus with a new generation. The "relational and contextual" curation herein establishes this Mennonite historian as a leading and keenly engaged steward of Merton's voice and legacy.
       --Ched Myers
          co-author of Healing Haunted Histories:
               A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization

Merton's extensive correspondence is an incredibly rich resource for understanding his life and thought. In this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted book, Gordon Oyer focuses on some of Merton's most significant exchanges of letters to illuminate the development of his thinking on peace, race, and ecology. Along the way, Oyer makes us part of the ongoing conversation on social transformation.
       --Christine M. Bochen
          Professor Emerita of Religious Studies
                 Nazareth College, Rochester, NY
           Co-editor of A Life in Letters:
               The Essential Collection (Merton) and
              The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia

After Oyer's compelling and award-winning 2014 Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest, comes now his penetrating insight into Merton's correspondence on the Christian vocation to social movements, corrosiveness of white liberal racism, ecological consciousness versus utopian optimism, and limits of moral outrage. Merton is reliably prescient. Oyer's warm, compassionate voice and skill as historian locates these letters inside our own urgent social questions with a subtle buoyancy. Oyer's Signs of Hope empowers readers to "manifest the mercy and truth of God in history" (as Merton urged in "Letters to a White Liberal").
            --Rose Berger
               senior editor Sojourners magazine
                  author of Bending the Arch: Poems
                  int'l Thomas Merton Society board

Signs of Hope is truly prophetic as Gordon Oyer distills timely insights from Thomas Merton's correspondence on the critical issues of his day as if Merton were addressing them himself, here and now, in the twenty-first century.
           --Paul Pearson
               Director, Thomas Merton Center