In the 1950s and ’60s, Thomas Merton, a monk of the Trappist monastery
of Gethsemani in Kentucky, published a string of books that are among
the most influential spiritual books of the twentieth century—including
the mega–best seller
The Seven-Storey Mountain. He was something
of a rock star for a cloistered monk, and from his monastic cell he
enjoyed a wide and lively correspondence with people from the worlds of
religion, literature, and politics. During that period he also explored
and wrote extensively on Buddhism, Sufism, art, and social action. The
man to whom he owed obedience in the cloistered life was a much more
traditional Catholic, his abbot, Dom James Fox. To say that these two
men had a conflicted relationship would be an understatement, but the
tension their differences in orientation brought actually led to
creative results on both sides and to a kind of hard-won respect and
love. Roger Lipsey’s portrait of this unusual relationship is compelling
and moving; it shows Merton in the years his imagination was taking him
far beyond the walls of the monastery, and eventually, literally to
Asia.
313 pages. Paperback.