Thinking Through Thomas Merton

Download or read book Thinking through Thomas Merton written by Robert Inchausti and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master written by Thomas Merton and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes excerpts from "Seven storey mountain", "Conjectures of a guilty bystander" and many other works including a chronology of Merton's life.

Download or read book Man of Dialogue written by Gregory K. Hillis and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Catholic was Thomas Merton? Since his death in 1968, Merton’s Catholic identity has been regularly questioned, both by those who doubt the authenticity of his Catholicism given his commitment to ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and by those who admire Merton as a thinker but see him as an aberration who rebelled against his Catholicism to articulate ideas that went against the church. In this book, Gregory K. Hillis illustrates that Merton’s thought was intertwined with his identity as a Catholic priest and emerged out of a thorough immersion in the church’s liturgical, theological, and spiritual tradition. In addition to providing a substantive introduction to Merton’s life and thought, this book illustrates that Merton was fundamentally shaped by his identity as a Roman Catholic.

Download or read book The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton written by Hugh Turley and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seldom can one predict that a book will have an effect on history, but this is such a work. Merton's many biographers and the American press now say unanimously that he died from accidental electrocution. From a careful examination of the official record, including crime scene photographs that the authors have found that the investigating police in Thailand never saw, and from reading the letters of witnesses, they have discovered that the accidental electrocution conclusion is totally false. The widely repeated story that Merton had taken a shower and was therefore wet when he touched a lethal faulty fan was made up several years after the event and is completely contradicted by the evidence. Hugh Turley and David Martin identify four individuals as the primary promoters of the false accidental electrocution narrative. Another person, they show, should have been treated as a murder suspect. The most likely suspect in plotting Merton's murder, a man who was a much stronger force for peace than most people realize, they identify as the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States government. Thomas Merton was the most important Roman Catholic spiritual and anti-warfare-state writer of the 20th century. To date, he has been the subject of 28 biographies and numerous other books. Remarkably, up to now no one has looked critically at the mysterious circumstances surrounding his sudden death in Thailand. From its publication date in the 50th anniversary of his death, into the foreseeable future, this carefully researched work will be the definitive, authoritative book on how Thomas Merton died.

Download or read book Thoughts In Solitude written by Thomas Merton and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thoughtful and eloquent, as timely (or timeless) now as when it was originally published in 1956, Thoughts in Solitude addresses the pleasure of a solitary life, as well as the necessity for quiet reflection in an age when so little is private. Thomas Merton writes: "When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate." Thoughts in Solitude stands alongside The Seven Storey Mountain as one of Merton's most uring and popular works. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, is perhaps the foremost spiritual thinker of the twentiethcentury. His diaries, social commentary, and spiritual writings continue to be widely read after his untimely death in 1968.

Download or read book The Seeker and the Monk written by Scott Sophfronia and published by Broadleaf Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we truly belong to each other? What if we are all walking around shining like the sun? Mystic, monk, and activist Thomas Merton asked those questions in the twentieth century. Writer Sophfronia Scott is asking them today. In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times. As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it? By engaging in this lively discourse, readers will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within--and even to love--this despairing and radiant world.

Download or read book New Seeds of Contemplation written by Thomas Merton and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of thirty-nine short essays in which Thomas Merton examines what true contemplation is and how it can impact one's spirituality.