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The second volume of Thomas Merton's letters is devoted to his correspondence with friends -- relatives and family friends, longtime friends, special friends, young people he regarded as new friends, and circular letters addressed to groups of friends. They range from 1931, ten years before he became a monk, to 1968, the year in which he died at a monastic conference in Thailand.
Adolescence can be best summarized as a time of authenticity, passion, and advocacy. As adolescents start maturing, on a life journey that leads them away from dependence on their parents to becoming an independent adult, they often seek out honest and transparent mentors to learn from and trust for wisdom and guidance. Although Thomas Merton, the celebrated spiritual author and Cistercian monk, is better remembered for his writings on ecumenism, nonviolence, and advocacy, he also had several documented correspondences with adolescents throughout his life. By examining these artifacts, it is clear that Thomas Merton had great insight into the spiritual needs and challenges of adolescents. Throughout his life, Merton’s authentic struggles often parallel the searching nature that defines adolescent spirituality. Through scholarship and practice this book will explore how the life and writings of Thomas Merton may serve as a guide and bridge for ministers of adolescents, and will offer some practical suggestions for minsters, educators, and parents on topics affecting contemporary adolescents, through the lens of Thomas Merton’s life and writings.
2015 Thomas Merton "Louie" award winner for a publication that provides "fresh direction and provocative insight to Merton Studies," presented by the International Thomas Merton Society. In the fall of 1964, Trappist monk Thomas Merton prepared to host an unprecedented gathering of peace activists. "About all we have is a great need for roots," he observed, "but to know this is already something." His remark anticipated their agenda--a search for spiritual roots to nurture sound motives for "protest." This event's originality lay in the varied religious commitments present. Convened in an era of well-kept faith boundaries, members of Catholic (lay and clergy), mainline Protestant, historic p...
Thomas Merton was arguably the twentieth century's most widely published and widely read spiritual writer. This book explores Merton's prophetic writings and experience as they offer guidance for those seeking to experience God, to simplify their lives, to live more humanly, and to shape Christian community in the face of alienation, consumerism, noise, and technology. The book includes parts of three previously unpublished conference contributions by Merton on technology. Exploring Merton's thoughts on monastic renewal, prayer, radical simplicity, ecology, technology, war, peace and interfaith dialogue, Dekar reminds us why Merton was so influential and why he continues to be so.
On the surface Christianity and Zen Buddhism can appear to be worlds apart, even antithetical. Christianity affirms the reality of the Tri-personal God and the eternal salvation of mortal human beings; Zen denies both the existence of God and the soul. Yet Thomas Merton, the Catholic spiritual master, and D. T. Suzuki, the famous teacher of Zen, engaged in an extensive dialogue and found ways of mutually affirming shared meanings of God and person that each regarded to be true. This book explores that dialogue within the larger context of Merton's attraction to Buddhism and considers the implications of their achievement for contemporary theologies of religious pluralism.
The late Dr. Nass Cannon Jr. (MD) was a physician for the indigent poor for over forty years and an internationally renowned scholar of the theologian and monk, Thomas Merton. In Search of the Healing Spirit follows a narrative arc across several essays of Dr. Cannon's analysis and reflections on life and Thomas Merton's theological contributions. First articulated by Dr. Cannon at the outset of his journey to serve the poor, the guiding principle of the book is an exploration of what it means to be broken and called to heal each other, ourselves, and the world. As Dr. Cannon writes, "I am a physician who views his root identity as one called to heal. Yet, I experience myself as broken, as o...
A compendium of spiritual guidance in a beautiful special edition. “Every moment and every event in every man’s life on Earth plants something in his soul,” wrote Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk, Merton was both a poet and a theologian who pondered monastic life. He was praised for his meditations and conversations with God, as well as interfatith dialogue, tolerance, and non-violent activism during the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War. On Christian Contemplation, edited by Merton scholar Paul Pearson, is a collection of the great monk’s work, compiled into a gift-size edition. With poems, reflections, and social commentary, this is the perfect book to nurture the spirit of faith and duty guided by one of the twentieth century’s leading voices of theology and social justice.
This work focuses on a reality central to each human life and basic to every branch of theology; namely, the immanent transcendence of God. This study begins by exploring that theme of mystery hidden yet revealed from the perspective of the interrelationship of transcendence, self-actualization and creative expression. The book goes on to describe the interplay of those three elements in the lives and the works of,Thomas Merton, monk and writer, and Georgia O'Keeffe, artist. People from a wide variety of backgrounds and traditions will find this study a stimulating source of insight for their spiritual quest.
This critical edition makes available for the first time Thomas Merton's novitiate conferences on liturgy. Though dating from the period just before the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, Merton's commentaries remain pertinent for their insights on his own commitment to this central dimension of Christian life, on his work introducing students to the patterns that would mark their lives as monks, and on the perennial meaning of the key events of the liturgical year. The thoroughly annotated text is preceded by an extensive introduction situating this material in the context of Merton's lifelong writing on liturgy. As Merton's former student Br. Paul Quenon writes in his foreword: "Nowhere in all of Merton's writings can one find such an extended demonstration of the hermeneutical approach he took in commenting on Scripture. This was focused intensely on finding the meaning Scripture had for our life in God . . . These notes . . . take us into one man's lifetime of reflection and seasoned experience of the Church Year."
Mario Aguilar skillfully, elegantly, and clearly presents the life and thought of some of the major spiritual forces of our time as a starting point for his own compelling reflections on the relationship between contemplation and politics... We need more books like this one. Professor Ivan Petrella, University of Miami