“If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”
—Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Sometimes there are dots just waiting to be connected....

I was rather surprised when Pope Francis mentioned Thomas Merton in his address to Congress a couple weeks ago. I have learned a lot about Merton over the last decade while on a random intellectual quest that has included other seemingly unrelated modern-day folks like Hernando de Soto and Mario Vargas Llosa—a Nobel Prize winner who I happened to meet many years ago. Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude is one of my favorite books.

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