Download or read The Seven Storey Mountain PDF, written by Thomas Merton and published by Harvest Books. This book was released on 1978 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic of faith has touched millions of lives--and is now available in a beautiful gift edition. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Download or read Summary of Thomas Merton s The Seven Storey Mountain PDF, written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-03-23T22:59:00Z with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read The Seven Storey Mountain PDF, written by Thomas Merton and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1998-10-04 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. .

Download or read The Rise of Liberal Religion PDF, written by Matthew Hedstrom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read Religion and Literature PDF, written by Robert Detweiler and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read On Thomas Merton PDF, written by Mary Gordon and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”

Download or read The Catholic Counterculture in America 1933 1962 PDF, written by James Terence Fisher and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read Thomas Merton s Art of Denial PDF, written by David D. Cooper and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read Beneath the Mask of Holiness PDF, written by Mark Shaw and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiritual writer Thomas Merton is the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. Despite appearances to the contrary, in 1966 he was a troubled, lonely monk. Only when the suffering Merton fell madly in love with a student nurse, a forbidden, erotic affair condemned by the Catholic Church, would he discover whether his devotion to God was stronger than his dedication to the woman he called "a miracle in my life." Truly an inspirational story based on Merton's personal journals, new information and sources such as fellow monks, Beneath the Mask of Holiness presents a unique portrayal of the famous man, one never revealed in its entirety before.

Download or read The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton PDF, written by Patrick Samway, S.J. and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914–2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915–1968) became friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the publication of Merton's 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until a few months before Merton's untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton's books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy. These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton's most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux's unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

Download or read A History of Solitude PDF, written by David Vincent and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.

Download or read Echoing Silence PDF, written by Thomas Merton and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2007-02-13 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 the monk and the vocation of the writer were incompatible. Monasticism called for complete surrender to the absolute, whereas writing demanded a tactical withdrawal from experience in order to record it. He eventually came to accept his dual vocation as two sides of the same spiritual coin and used it as a source of creative tension the rest of his life. Merton’s thoughts on writing have never been compiled into a single volume until now. Robert Inchausti has mined the vast Merton literature to discover what he had to say on a whole spectrum of literary topics, including writing as a spiritual calling, the role of the Christian writer in a secular society, the joys and mysteries of poetry, and evaluations of his own literary work. Also included are fascinating glimpses of his take on a range of other writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Albert Camus, James Joyce, and even Henry Miller, along with many others.

Download or read Pure Act PDF, written by Michael N. McGregor and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate biography of the avant-garde poet and spiritual seeker who abandoned his career to join the circus and live among fishermen in Greece. Robert Lax inspired Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, William Maxwell and many others with his quest to live a true life as both an artist and a spiritual seeker. Known in Europe as a avant-garde poet, Lax worked at The New Yorker, wrote Hollywood screenplays and edited a Paris literary journal—when he wasn’t studying philosophy, serving the poor in Harlem or living in a sanctuary high in the French Alps. Lax called his approach to life pure act: a way of living in the moment that was both spontaneous and practiced, God-inspired and self-chosen. By devoting himself to simplicity, poverty and prayer, he expanded his capacity for peace, joy and love while producing distinctive poetry of such stark beauty critics called him “one of America’s greatest experimental poets” and “one of the new ‘saints’ of the avant-garde.” Biographer Michael N. McGregor met Lax in Greece when he was a young seeker himself. He continued to visit him regularly over fifteen years. Pure Act is a tale of adventure, an exploration of friendship, an anthology of wisdom, and a testament to the liberating power of living an uncommon life. Excellence in Publishing Award, Association of Catholic Publishers Honorable Mention, Catholic Press Association Book Award Finalist, Washington State Book Award

Download or read Circuitous Journeys PDF, written by David J. Leigh and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography provides a close reading and analysis of ten major life stories by twentieth-century leaders and thinkers from a variety of religious and cultural traditions: Mohandas Gandhi, Black Elk, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm X, Paul Cowan, Rigoberta Menchu, Dan Wakefield, and Nelson Mandela. The book uses approaches from literary criticism, developmental psychology (influenced by Erik Erikson, James Fowler, and Carol Gilligan), and spirituality (influenced by John S. Donne, Emile Griffin, Walter Conn, and Bernard Lonergan). Each text is read in the light of the autobiographical tradition begun by St. Augustine’s Confessions, but with a focus on distinctively modern and post-modern transformations of the self-writing genre. The twentieth-century context of religious alienation, social autonomy, identity crises and politics, and the search for social justice is examined in each text.

Download or read Remembering the Forgotten Merton PDF, written by William J. Meegan and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-08 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book written about John Paul Merton, Thomas Merton’s younger brother. Neither scholar nor saint, the life of John Paul Merton illustrates there is more than one way to live a meaningful and holy life. His was a quietly incubating spirituality guided by his law of love. He began life singing in a crib and ended his life praying as he lay dying in a dinghy in the English Channel during World War II. This book examines the relationship he had with his famous brother, Thomas, especially in the years before Tom became a monk. It examines, among other topics, the relationship between Thomas, the intellectual, and John Paul, the action-oriented younger brother. As a teenager, John Paul earned the nickname “Wildman,” and as an adult he learned to live life to the fullest on his own terms. The bumps and bruises of his life—orphaned at twelve years of age, dismissed from Cornell without his degree, and frustrated in his effort to serve in World War II as a fighter pilot—were faced head on. He lived life as an optimist without losing sight of the reality of his world. Most importantly, John Paul’s “journey of hidden holiness” can inspire each of us as we, too, journey onward.

Download or read Authenticity Passion and Advocacy PDF, written by Thomas E. Malewitz and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adolescence can be best summarized as a time of authenticity, passion, and advocacy. As adolescents start maturing, on a life journey that leads them away from dependence on their parents to becoming an independent adult, they often seek out honest and transparent mentors to learn from and trust for wisdom and guidance. Although Thomas Merton, the celebrated spiritual author and Cistercian monk, is better remembered for his writings on ecumenism, nonviolence, and advocacy, he also had several documented correspondences with adolescents throughout his life. By examining these artifacts, it is clear that Thomas Merton had great insight into the spiritual needs and challenges of adolescents. Throughout his life, Merton's authentic struggles often parallel the searching nature that defines adolescent spirituality. Through scholarship and practice this book will explore how the life and writings of Thomas Merton may serve as a guide and bridge for ministers of adolescents, and will offer some practical suggestions for minsters, educators, and parents on topics affecting contemporary adolescents, through the lens of Thomas Merton's life and writings.

Download or read Spiritual Direction PDF, written by Kevin G. Culligan OCD and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revitalized ministry of spiritual direction is one of the surest signs of renewal in today's Church. In Spiritual Direction: Contemporary Readings, seventeen leading writers and spiritual directors discuss the history, meaning, demands, and practice of this ministry. Through timely articles by such recognized authors as William Barry, Sandra Schneiders, Louis Cameli, Kallistos Ware, and John Wright, one comes to see that spiritual direction belongs, not to a spiritual elite, but to the entire Church--men and women, clergy and laity, members of religious communities. Compiled especially for those entering spiritual direction, either as directors or directees, this book is an excellent introduction to an exciting ministry in today's Church. A valuable feature of this book is a concluding section with recommendations for further readings. Listing important articles and books on spiritual direction published in recent years, this section helps readers to continue exploring this vital area of contemporary spirituality.