Thomas Merton
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Course In Desert Spirituality
$19.95Add to cartThomas Merton’s sessions with the young monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani showcase Merton’s brilliant ability to survey the key figures, and synthesize their writings, inspiring his listeners and readers with what it means for the spiritual life. Like its companion volume A Course in Christian Mysticism, this book is a collection of fifteen lectures that get to the heart of Merton’s belief that monastic wisdom and spirituality are applicable for everyone. This compact volume allows anyone to learn from one of the twentieth century’s greatest Catholic spiritual teachers. The study materials at the back of the book, including additional primary source readings and thoughtful questions for reflection and discussion, make this an essential text for any student of Christian desert spirituality.
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Cistercian Fathers And Their Monastic Theology
$49.95Add to cartThese conferences, presented by Thomas Merton to the novices at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1963-1964, focus mainly on the life and writings of his great Cistercian predecessor St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). Guiding his students through Bernard’s Marian sermons, his treatise On the Love of God, his controversy with Peter Abelard, and above all his great series of sermons on the Song of Songs, Merton reveals why Bernard was the major religious and cultural figure in Europe during the first half of the twelfth century and why he has remained one of the most influential spiritual theologians of Western Christianity from his own day until the present. As James Finley writes in his preface to this volume, “Merton is teaching us in these notes how to be grateful and amazed that the ancient wisdom that shimmers and shines in the eloquent and beautiful things that mystics say is now flowing in our sincere desire to learn from God how to find our way to God.”
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Life Of The Vows
$44.95Add to cartAs novice master of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton presented weekly conferences to familiarize his charges with the meaning and purpose of the vows they aspired to undertake. In this setting, he offered a thorough exposition of the theological, canonical, and above all spiritual dimensions of the vows.
Merton set the vows firmly in the context of the anthropological, moral, soteriological, and ecclesial dimensions of human, Christian, and monastic life. He addressed such classical themes of Christian morality as the nature of the human person and his acts; the importance of justice in relation to the Passion of Christ, to friendship and to love; and self-surrender as the key to grace, prayer and the vowed life. Merton’s words on these topics clearly spring from a committed heart and often flow with the soaring intensity of style that we have come to expect in his more enthusiastic prose.
The texts of these conferences represent the longest and most systematically organized of any of numerous series of conferences that Merton presented during the decade of his mastership. They may be the most directly pastoral work Merton ever wrote.
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Alfred Delp SJ
$22.00Add to cartAlfred Delp (1907-1945) was a German Jesuit condemned to death by the Nazis for anti-Hitler activities. While awaiting execution Delp composed this series of meditations on Advent, the Lord’s Prayer, the tasks of the future, the meaning of happiness, and other spiritual themes.
Written on the edge of eternity, Delp’s reflections continue to bear a special power and poignancy. His words snow the ongoing relevance of the Gospel in an age of idolatrous power and capricious violence.
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Dialogues With Silence
$16.99Add to cartAn intensely personal devotional book from Thomas Merton, the ultimate spiritual writer of our time, showing his contemplative and religious side through his prayers and rarely-seen drawings. The only Merton gift book available.
Dialogues with Silence contains a selection of prayers from throughout Merton’s life–from his journals, letters, poetry, books–accompanied by all 100 of Merton’s rarely seen, delightful Zen-like pen-and-ink drawings, and will attract new readers as well as Merton devotees. There is no other Merton devotional like this, and the paperback edition will be elegantly designed and packaged.
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Thomas Merton On Saint Bernard
$29.95Add to cartThe best-known Cistercian of the twentieth century reflects on the teaching and life of the most reknown Cistercian of the twelfth century. Three essays written in the 1950s explore the relation of contemplation and action in the monastic vocation and in the life of Christians.
