A lifetime of re-reading Merton has convinced me that the existential note ringing through his body of work is key, not only to making sense of his wide-ranging thought, but to any real understanding of the man himself.
Thomas Merton
Posted inIdeas
My forty years of friendship with Thomas Merton
Can you be friends with a person who never knew you even existed? If the answer to these questions is yes, then I am friends with Thomas Merton.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The atomic nightmare turns 80: How Catholics reacted to the arrival of nuclear bombs
July 16 marks 80 years since the first atomic bomb was detonated. The specter of nuclear annihilation has been with us ever since.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Robert Giroux: the Catholic bookman who edited Merton (and Flannery and Percy and Kerouac)
Robert Giroux edited some of the 20th century’s leading writers, including some prominent Catholic voices like Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Thomas Merton.
Posted inArts & Culture, Vantage Point
Thomas Merton’s editor on the surprise success of ‘The Seven Storey Mountain’
In 1988, famed publisher Robert Giroux related his memories of what it was like to read and publish Thomas Merton’s ‘The Seven Storey Mountain.’
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: The story of Thomas Merton’s forgotten brother
‘Remembering the Forgotten Merton’ is a brief biography of Thomas Merton’s brother John Paul, whom Merton fans know primarily through the powerful elegy that Merton composed to mark his brother’s death as a fighter pilot in the Second World War.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Remembering Thomas Merton—and his book that changed my life
‘The Seven Storey Mountain,’ a book whose 75th anniversary is celebrated this month, is widely considered a spiritual classic, and it continues to find new readers every year.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The mystery of Thomas Merton’s death—and the witness of America magazine’s poetry editor
John Moffitt, the longtime poetry editor of ‘America,’ met Thomas Merton the week Merton died, and wrote of the account for ‘America.’
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
The death of a good monk: Celebrating Brother Joseph’s simple and holy life
Brother Mary Joseph lay in state at Mepkin Abbey, his simple funeral liturgy soon to begin, fitting for a man who lived a simple life at the South Carolina Trappist monastery.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton and the modern antiwar movement
A year after his death, a look back on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh—and his influence on many American writers on nonviolence, mindfulness and contemplative spirituality.