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A celebration of Merton's spiritual autobiography is accompanied by an introduction from the editor and a note from Merton's biographer.
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was born in 1915, in a war-torn world. My parents were artists, and I inherited their integrity and their capacity for work and vision. But I also inherited their dissatisfaction with the world’s condition. #2 My father, Owen Merton, was a music master and a pious man who taught at Christ’s College in Christchurch, on the South Island. He had a lot of energy and independence, and he told me how it was in the hill country and in the mountains of the South Island. #3 My father had come to the Pyrenees because of a dream he had of living in France and raising a family. But when the friends of his wife and him came to visit, they brought the newspapers, which depicted the Allies overcoming the Germans. My grandparents were worried about my mother being in a land at war, and they could not stay much longer at Prades. #4 My American grandfather, Pop, was a buoyant and excitable man who, on docks, boats, trains, in stations, in elevators, on busses, in hotels, in restaurants, used to get keyed up and start ordering everybody around. My grandmother, Bonnemaman, was the opposite and her natural deliberateness and hesitancy increased in proportion to Pop’s excesses.
One of the most famous books ever written about a man’s search for faith and peace. The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-six, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders—the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it. At the abbey, he wrote this extraordinary testament, a unique spiritual autobiography that has been recognized as one of the most influential religious works of our time. Translated into more than twenty languages, it has touched millions of lives. .
Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Best First Book Prize of the American Society of Church History Named a Society for U. S. Intellectual History Notable Title in American Intellectual History The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, Matthew S. Hedstrom contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise-most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the numerical decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals a more complex and fascinating story, one Hedstrom tells in The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture-particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century-as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom is able to provide a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-WWII period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. This compelling history of religion and book culture not only shows how reading and book buying were critical twentieth-century religious practices, but also provides a model for thinking about the relationship of religion to consumer culture more broadly. In this way, The Rise of Liberal Religion offers both innovative cultural history and new ways of seeing the imprint of liberal religion in our own times.
From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings. “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.” So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton “writer to writer,” Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as “a man of dialogue,” and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as external—an unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer. Rich with excerpts from Merton’s own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who “lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”
Featuring a selection from over 80 key texts, this anthology aims to help the reader to understand the common origins of religious expression and of literature. The texts included cover classical literature, the Bible, English and European classics and contemporary works.
James Fisher argues that Catholic culture was transformed when products of the "immigrant church," largely inspired by converts like Dorothy Day, launched a variety of spiritual, communitarian, and literary experiments. He also explores the life and works
The Mississippi River was of vital importance to the Civil War efforts of both the North and South. Immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter, Confederate soldiers closed the Mississippi from New Orleans northward to Columbus, Kentucky, and Belmont, Missouri, effectively shutting off transportation and commerce to the northwestern states of the Union. President Lincoln responded with a national military strategy to regain control of the river, symbolized by the struggle to capture the town of Vicksburg. It took seven attempts for General U.S. Grant to deploy his soldiers around the difficult terrain, and finally to confront face-to-face the Confederate soldiers entrenched in Vicksburg. The strategies, battlefield dynamics and innovative bridgebuilding techniques used are highlighted in this day-by-day account of Grant's efforts in a pivotal campaign of the Civil War.
Trappist monk and best-selling author, Thomas Merton battled constantly within himself as he attempted to reconcile two seemingly incompatible roles in life. As a devout Catholic, he took vows of silence and stability, longing for the security and closure of the monastic life. But as a writer he felt compelled to seek friendships in literary circles and success in the secular world. In Thomas Merton's Art of Denial, David D. Cooper traces Merton's attempts to reach an accommodation with himself, to find a way in which "the silence of the monk could live compatibly with the racket of the writer." From the roots of this painful division in the unsettled early years of Merton's life, to the turmoil of his directionless early adult years in which he first attempted to write, he was besieged with self-doubts. Turning to life in a monastery in Kentucky in 1941, Merton believed he would find the solitude and peace lacking in the quotidian world. But, as Merton once wrote, "An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck." Merton felt compelled to choose between life as either a less than perfect priest or a less prolific writer. Discovering in his middle years that the ideal monastic life he had envisioned was an impossibility, Merton turned his energies to abolishing war. It was in this pursuit that he finally succeeded in fusing the two sides of his life, converting his frustrated idealism into a radical humanism placed in the service of world peace. Here is a portrait of a man torn between the influence of the twentieth century and the serenity of the religious ideal, a man who used his own personal crises to guide his youthful ideals to a higher purpose.