Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Pocket Thomas Merton
This pocket-sized treasury of wisdom from the influential Christian contemplative, political activist, social visionary, and literary figure is abridged from the larger collection Seeds by Robert Inchausti (Shambhala, 2002).
Thomas Merton's American Prophecy
Thomas Merton was one of the most significant American spiritual writers of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published shortly after the Second World War, inspired an entire generation to reconsider the materialist preoccupations of consumer society. Twenty years later, his essays on nonviolence, contemplation, and Zen provided the most telling orthodox religious response to the New Left's radical critique of post-industrial society. 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 th...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seeds
The essence of Merton's thought and its relevance for today, presented in a collection of short readings from a broad selection of his work.
Illusions of Freedom
Illusions of Freedom examines the opinions and ideas of two twentieth-century writers--Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk living in the United States, and Jacques Ellul, a French Protestant. Contemporaries, they never met or corresponded with each other, but their critique of the influence that technology was beginning to have on the human condition is strikingly similar. Both Merton and Ellul drew upon the ideas of others in formulating their worldview, to include Karl Barth, Soren Kierkegaard, Aldous Huxley, and Karl Marx. Jeffrey Shaw examines the influence that these other philosophers had on Merton and Ellul as they formulated their own ideas on technology's impact on freedom. Tracing the similarities, and in some cases the differences, between their critiques of technology and the idea that progress is always to be seen as something inherently good, one finds that they bring a unique perspective to the debate and offer readers an alternative avenue for reflecting on the meaning of technology and its impact on our lives in the twenty-first century.
