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Thomas Merton wrote The Silent Life a decade after he took orders. In his Prologue, Merton describes the book as "a meditation on the monastic life by one who, without any merit of his own, is privileged to know that life on the inside . . . who seeks only to speak as the mouthpiece of a tradition centuries old." It is a remarkable work-one that combines a lucid and informative description of the nature and forms of monasticism, communal and solitary, with a passionate defense of the contemplative's quest for God. The intense beauty of Merton's meditation, radiating from beneath its...

In Faith and Violence, Thomas Merton offers concrete and pungent social criticisms grounded in prophetic faith about such issues as Vietnam, racism, violence, and war.

The whole problem of our time is the problem of love. How are we going to recover the ability to love ourselves and to love one another?

We cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

There is a distinction between a contrite sense of sin and a feeling of guilt. The former is a true and healthy thing, the latter tends to be false and pathological.

The man who suffers from a sense of guilt does not want to feel guilty, but at the same time he does not want to be...

The second volume of Thomas Merton's "gusty, passionate journals" (Thomas Moore) chronicles Merton's advancements to priesthood and emergence as a bestselling author with the surprise success of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Spanning an eleven-year period, Entering the Silence reflects Merton's struggle to balance his vocation to solitude with the budding literary career that would soon established him as one of the most important spiritual writers of our century.

Thomas Merton was recognized as one of those rare Western minds that are entirely at home with the Zen experience. In this collection, he discusses diverse religious concepts-early monasticism, Russian Orthodox spirituality, the Shakers, and Zen Buddhism-with characteristic Western directness. Merton not only studied these religions from the outside but grasped them by empathy and living participation from within. "All these studies," wrote Merton, "are united by one central concern: to understand various ways in which men of different traditions have conceived the meaning and method of...