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Thomas Merton's American Prophecy
In Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, Robert Inchausti provides a succinct summary and original interpretation of Merton's contribution to American thought. More than just a critical biography, this book lifts Merton out of the isolation of his monastic sub-culture and brings him back into dialogue with contemporary secular thinkers. In the process, it reopens one of the roads not taken at that fateful, cultural crossroads called "The Sixties." Inchausti presents Merton not as the spokesman for any particular group, cause, or idea, but rather as the quintessential American outsider who defined himself in opposition to the world, then discovered a way back into dialogue with that world and compassion for it. As a result, Merton was the harbinger of a still yet to be realized eschatological counter-culture: the unacknowledged precursor, alternative, and heir to Norman O. Brown's defense of mystery in the life of the mind.
The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People
This book examines how the spiritual longings of ordinary people have shaped the most progressive political and cultural movements of the twentieth century and given birth to a new postmodern perspective on existence that recoups the traditional religious verities on the far side of both literary modernism and neo-Marxism. Inchausti focuses on figures who have been instrumental in defending the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures and oppressed minorities. He demonstrates that Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Lech Walesa share an ethic that is, at once, plebeian in origin and yet sublime in aspiration.
Echoing Silence
When Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery in December 1941, he turned his back on secular life—including a very promising literary career. He sent his journals, a novel-in-progess, and copies of all his poems to his mentor, Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, for safe keeping, fully expecting to write little, if anything, ever again. It was a relatively short-lived resolution, for Merton almost immediately found himself being assigned writing tasks by his Abbot—one of which was the autobiographical essay that blossomed into his international best-seller The Seven Storey Mountain. That book made him famous overnight, and for a time he struggled with the notion that the vocation of th...
Thinking through Thomas Merton
With the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Thomas Merton became a bestselling author, writing about spiritual contemplation in a modern context. Although Merton (1915–1968) lived as a Trappist monk, he advocated a spiritual life that was not a retreat from the world, but an alternative to it, particularly to the deadening materialism and spiritual vacuity of the postwar West. Over the next twenty years, Merton wrote for a wide audience, bringing the wisdom of Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism into dialogue with the period's contemporary thought. In Thinking through Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti introduces readers to Merton and evaluates his continuing relevance for our time. Inchausti shows how Merton broke the high modernist trance so that we might become the change we wish to see in the world by refiguring the lost virtues of silence, contemplation, and community in a world enamored by the will to power, virtuoso performance, radical skepticism, and materialist metaphysics. Merton's defense of contemplative culture is considered in light of the postmodern thought of recent years and emerges as a compelling alternative.
The Pocket Thomas Merton
A treasury of wisdom from the influential Christian contemplative, political activist, social visionary, and literary figure. Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was spiritual parent to a generation—and his influence, through his many books, has only increased in the half-century since his death. He was a hermit who maintained a compelling correspondence with some of the most influential thinkers of his age; he was a social and political activist whose ideas had a seminal influence in the world beyond his monastic cloister; and he was a Christian who saw through the boundaries of religious identity in a way that was truly ahead of his time. This collection of short excerpts from his voluminous wri...
Hard to Be a Saint in the City
An exploration of Beat spirituality--seen through excerpts from the writings of the seminal writers of Beat Generation themselves. It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.
Spitwad Sutras
This work goes beyond the basics of classroom management to consider the path of both teacher and student toward authentic intellectual maturity and spiritual growth. It provides a framework for stripping away the external and personal pressures that bleed intellectual content out of classroom teaching so that teachers may, in fact, experience their vocation as sublime. Written in the novelistic first-person narrative, it is a seasoned teacher's story of his initiation from graduate student at the University of Chicago to ninth-grade teacher in a Catholic high school where he manned the battle lines in provincial, petty, sometime even violent world of American secondary school. It is also the story of how a certain Brother Blake, a 67-year-old practitioner of the pedagogy of the sublime, passed on his vision of classroom teaching as a sublime vocation. A major contribution to the field by the acclaimed author of The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.
The Hero in Transition
An investigation of society's heroes during any time period will reveal the personnel deemed worthy of being emulated at that particular time by that particular society. There will be many old and time-tested figures, sometimes with new faces and new profiles; there will also be a mix of new faces. Thus the hero--like history itself--is constantly in transition, and both the hero and the transition are fundamental to the study of a culture. These essays turn the pantheon of heroes around before our eyes and reveal the many complicated aspects of hero worship.
"God Is Dead" and I Don't Feel So Good Myself
In this pertinent and engaging volume leading Christian philosophers, theologians, and writers from all over the denominational map explode the black-and-white binaries that characterize both sides of the New Atheism debate. They transcend the self-assured shouting matches of this latest expression of the culture wars by engaging in rigorous, polychromatic Christian reflection that considers the extent to which the atheistic critique-both new and old-might help the church move toward a more mature faith, authentic spirituality, charitable witness, and peaceable practice. With generous openness and ferocious wit, this collection of essays, interviews, memoir, poetry, and visual art-including ...
Prison of Women
Prison of Women presents oral testimonies of women incarcerated following the Spanish Civil War. The primary voice in the collection, Tomasa Cuevas, spent many years in prisons throughout Spain as a political prisoner. After the death of Franco in 1975, Cuevas began to collect oral testimonies from women she had known in prison as she traveled throughout Spain recording their stories. These, along with hers, eventually were published in three volumes in Spain. Prison of Women is a collaboration between Tomasa Cuevas and Mary E. Giles, translator and editor, who wrote the introduction and afterword, and provided contextual information in notes and a glossary. The testimonies offer a compelling record of the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, the aftermath of that horrendous struggle, and a revealing testament to the strength of the human spirit.
