Search Type
  • All
  • Subject
  • Title
  • Author
  • Publisher
  • Series Title
Search Title

Download

Witness to Freedom

The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis

Witness to Freedom( )
Author: Merton, Thomas
ISBN:978-1-4299-6686-3
Publication Date:Nov 1995
Publisher:Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Book Format:Ebook
List Price:Contact Supplier contact Contact Supplier contact
Book Description:

As the concluding volume in the five-volume series of The Letters of Thomas Merton, Witness to Freedom is in some respects the most revealing and dramatic book in the quintet. Since these letters deal with periods of serious crisis in Merton's life and vocation, they give readers for the first time, in his own words, the true details and behind-the-scenes facts. Witness to Freedom shows Merton as a living witness against war, perhaps one of the greatest of our century.

Book Details
Pages:384
Author Biography
Merton, Thomas (Author)
Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism.

After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death.

His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression.

Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.

020



Featured Books

The Velveteen Rabbit
Williams, Margery
Paperback: $9.95
Martyr!
Akbar, Kaveh
Hardback: $28.00
Parable of the Sower
Butler, Octavia E.
Paperback: $19.99

Rate this title:

Select your rating below then click 'submit'.






I do not wish to rate this title.