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Dom Flavian Burns (born Thomas Burns in 1931) was Abbot of Gethsemani from 1968-1973. Dom Flavian approved Merton's trip to Bangkok and later approved a side journey in the same trip to India, where Merton met the Dalai Lama. Burns had been inspired by «Seven Storey Mountain» after high school and was drawn to Gethsemani. There, he studied under Merton when Merton was Master of Scholastics. In 1966, after Merton had paved the way for hermits, Burns was allowed to live as a hermit at Gethsemani until taking over as Gethsemani's seventh abbot in 1968. (Source: The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, p. 35.)

Will Campbell was co-founder and publisher of «Katallagete» (Greek for "be reconciled!") along with editor Jim Holloway and the Committee of Southern Churchmen (CSC). His views in support of racial equality got him into trouble as a Baptist minister in the south and in campus ministry at the University of Mississippi. In 1956, he became Southern field director the Division of Racial and Cultural Relations for the National Council of Churches (NCC). He had some ideological differences and split with them in 1963, forming with others the Committee of Southern Churchmen from the moribund Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. (Source: Ford, Jennifer. "Will Campbell and Christ's Ambassadors: Selections from the Katallagete/James Y. Holloway Collection, Special Collections, University of Mississippi." «The Journal of Southern Religion»: August 2000. ‹http://jsr.fsu.edu/ford.htm›, accessed 2005/04/22.)

Ernesto Cardenal was a poet and priest from Nicaragua who had studied as a novice under Merton at Gethsemani from 1957-1959. While in seminary in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1959, Cardenal began a correspondence with Merton. Cardenal later returned to his native country to found a contemplative lay community called Our Lady of Solentiname on an island in Lake Nicaragua. Founded as an artistic community, it became more involved with the plight of the poor in the region. After Cardenal allied himself with the Sandinistas, his community was destroyed by government forces 1977. (Source: The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, p. 41; ).

Archbishop Alfonso Carinci was Titular Archbishop of Seleucia in Isauria and was Director General of a society called Adoratio Quotidiana et Perpetua Sanctissimi Eucharistiae Sacramenti inter Sacerdotes Cleri Saecularis (Daily Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration for Diocesan Priests). He writes from Rome.

Jorge Carrera Andrade was a poet from Ecuador. He went to law school but was more interested in poetry. He had an early interest in leftist politics. During this period of correspondence with Merton, he served as ambassador to France and to Venezuela. He served as ambassador to a number of other nations during his life. Merton liked his poems and translated at least six of them into English. (Source: "Carrera Andrade, Jorge." World Authors. 1996. Wilson Biographies Plus. Online. H.W. Wilson. Bellarmine University Library, Louisville, KY. 20 Oct. 2005. ‹http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com›.)

Fr. Dave Casey mentions in his letter, written from the guest house at Gethsemani, that he has spent the past seven years in Japan after receiving a doctorate from Harvard University in Oriental Religions. He was a colleague of other Catholic experts on Buddhism like Fr. Heinrich Dumoulin, S.J., and Fr. Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle.

Dr. R. S. Y. Chi was a scholar on many topics including Buddhism and Oriental art. He earned doctoral degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. Merton learned of him from Lunsford Yandell, who put them in contact in 1967. Dr. Chi was a professor at University of Indiana at the time of writing (Source: «The Hidden Ground of Love», pp. 121-122).

Noam Chomsky, best known for his landmark influence on linguistics, has also been a stern critic of political empiricism and a voice of the political left in the United States. He was a stalwart critic of the war in Vietnam and attempts to get Merton's support of "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority". (Source: "Chomsky, Avram Noam" The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Bellarmine University. 28 July 2004 ‹http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t98.e397›).

John Ciardi, according to the title of a lecture series on Ciardi, was a "Poet - Translator - Critic - Editor" (the lecture's brochure is included in the correspondence file). He long served as the Poetry Editor for the «Saturday Review» in New York, and in this capacity writes to Merton. He is noted for making poetry accessible to the public.

In 1933, Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani was appointed the Apostolic Delegate to the United States. He was elevated to Cardinal in 1958, replaced as Apostolic Delegate by Egidio Vagnozzi. In 1968, Cardinal Cicognani was made President of Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, Roman Curia, Vatican City.

Fr. Bernard Collins was Editor of «Monastic Studies». He and the publication were located at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, in 1963-1964. Later in 1964, Collins writes from Guadalupe Abbey in Lafayette, Oregon. By 1965 through the rest of the correspondence, he and «Monastic Studies» have moved to Mount Saviour Monastery in Pine City, New York. In December of 1966, Collins informs Merton that he has changed his religious name to Brendan instead of Bernard, and that not all solemnly professed monks would be addressed as "Father" and that he would now be Brother Brendan.

Br. Frederic Collins is a monk of Gethsemani Abbey. Because of his business studies before entering the monastery, Dom James Fox appointed him to start a mail-order business for the cheese and fruitcake that was made by the monks. This type of monastic consumerism did not appear to Merton, and the two did not see eye to eye. In the mid-sixties, he was sent to La Dehesa Monastery in Chile that Gethsemani was taking over as a mission from Spencer Abbey (becoming an independent monastery in 1970, and moving and changing its name to Miraflores in 1986). Unlike the mail order business, Merton was very interested in Latin America and considered this as a place to become a hermit. At this time, the two monks became closer. [Sources: personal account by Br. Frederic Collins (June 2003) and Web site of AIM (Inter-Monastery Alliance) ‹http://www.aimintl.org/communs/miraflores/miraflores.htm›.]

William Congdon was an American artist who converted to Catholicism in 1959. For much of his life, he was a wanderer who rejected a life as heir to a wealthy Rhode Island family. His conversion happened in Assisi, where he would live much of the rest of his life, dying in Italy in 1998. His early artistic influences came from the neo-romantic and abstract expressionist schools. After his conversion to Catholicism, he produced many religiously themed works of art. His biography from his foundation's web site likens his conversion to a "suicide", marginalizing him from the mainstream art community. Congdon wrote essays on art, especially sacred art and the duty of a Christian artist. Merton was writing about similar themes in his unpublished work, «Art and Worship». (Source: Official William Congdon Site, maintained by the William G. Congdon Foundation, ‹https://congdonfoundation.com›, 2004/09/16.)

Doña Luisa Coomaraswamy was the widow of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, a scholar of Indian, Persian, and Islamic art, who saw a unifying truth underlying major religions of the world. Doña Luisa took the responsibility of organizing his papers after his death and attempted to collect some of his unfinished projects for publication as a book of collected writings. She died before finishing this project, but Roger Lipsey edited a two-volume set of his papers published in 1977 (source: «The Hidden Ground of Love», p. 125).

José Coronel Urtecho was a poet from Nicaragua who influenced many other Latin American poets after him, including his nephew and former novice of Merton, Ernesto Cardenal. Having spent much of his youth in California, he read and admired Ezra Pound and other North American writers. After returning to Nicaragua, he founded the Vanguard Movement in 1927. He writes to Merton from his hacienda in Los Chiles, Costa Rica. A fan of Merton (and Merton of him), Coronel Urtecho planned to publish a Spanish anthology of Merton's work, but it did not appear in print. (Source: «The Courage for Truth», p. 171.)

Fr. Bernard Cranor has been a Benedictine at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert since 1989. He began his monastic experience at Holy Trinity in Utah from 1951-1956, taking the name Stephen. He did not take solemn vows there, but decided to study for the Dominicans in California, where he would take the name Bernard and remain there as a priest until joining the Benedictines. It is during this time of his studies with the Dominicans that he has an exchange of letters with Merton. He was friends with another Merton correspondent, Br. Antoninus (William Everson), to whom Merton sends his greetings.

At the time of Merton's letter to Dellinger, he was publisher and editor of «Liberation» magazine (Merton seemingly did not know Dellinger and addresses the letter "To the editor of Liberation"). Born into a prominent New England Republican family in 1815, Dellinger seemed destined to be a leader in the capitalist system he would later oppose. After earning an economics degree from Yale, he spent a year in Yale's Divinity School and another year in Union Theological Seminary in New York. Although he did not follow a vocation to the Christian clergy, he seems to have formulated a pacifist stand during these years and refused military conscription in 1940. He served a year in federal prison for this offense and later two more years for draft resistance during the Second World War. After founding a co-operative community with a farm and a newspaper, he founded «Liberation» magazine in 1956. The magazine was well-respected in the political left for its coverage of war resistance, social justice, and was one of the first national publications to recognize the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. He achieved some of his greatest notoriety during his protests of the Vietnam War, helping organize the first major protest against the Vietnam War in New York, the October 1965 Fifth Avenue Peace Parade. An organizer of the protest at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he was arrested with others who became known as the Chicago Seven. (Source: "Dellinger, David." Obituary from Current Biography. 2004. Wilson Biographies Plus. Online. H.W. Wilson. Bellarmine University Library, Louisville, KY. 5 Oct. 2006. ‹http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com›.)

Fr. Don Derivaux, known in his 18 years at Gethsemani as Francis, had later left the Trappists to become a priest in Mississippi. In 1965, while still with Gethsemani and studying in Rome, Merton writes and tells him of events at the abbey and of racial tensions in the south. Though he considers becoming laicized in his letter of 1968 to Merton, he remained a priest and has recently retired as a hermit.

Dom Willibrord-Christian van Dijk was abbot of the Trappist Abbey of Tilburg in the Netherlands from 1945-1966, during which time he founded the monastery at Rawa Seneng in Indonesia, first visiting in 1952. He returned to Indonesia as superior from 1966-1968, when he had to resign due to an eye disease. He later moved to the Maria Frieden Abbey to live with the Trappistine sisters there in Germany. He regretted having to leave for Germany before Merton could have made it to see him in Asia.

According to a letter in this file from Br. Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. dated 2001, Fr. James Dodge (known as Frater Linus while with the Trappists) was a novice with Merton in 1941-1942. He later went to Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina after its founding in 1949. After staying at Mepkin a few years, he left to become a parish priest.

Fr. Felix Donahue was a Trappist monk of Gethsemani. At the time of correspondence, he was studying in Rome and trying to vote by proxy in the abbatial election to replace Dom James Fox. He would later join the Trappist foundation of Nossa Senhora do Novo Mundo in Brazil.

Ivanhoe Donaldson was working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while corresponding with Merton. He worked alongside another Merton correspondent from this time, Marion Barry, who would later become mayor of Washington, D.C. He served as an advisor to Barry from the sixties to the eighties and was involved in Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign.