God speaks, and God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger . . . We must, then, see the truth in the stranger, and the truth we see must be a newly living truth, not just a projection of a dead conventional idea of our own — a projection of our own self upon the stranger.
— Thomas Merton, The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia by William H. Shannon, editor, Christine M. Bochen, editor, Patrick F. O'Connell, editor