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This book synthesizes the diverse reflections on technology by monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton to develop a compelling contemplative critique of the threats and challenges of nuclear war, communication technologies, and biotechnologies that may alter what it means to be human. At the core of his critique, Merton opposes a technological mentality that favors processes of efficiency and utility at the expense of our ultimate purpose, a quest for the wisdom to guide us to the divine source of our being and reality. To counter this modern idolatry, Merton's insights offer a path of reflection, balance, and community. More specifically, Merton offers some constructive approaches and healing possibilities through a balanced approach to work, a careful and intentional managing of technology, and an accessing of the recuperative dimensions of nature. In its conclusion the book brings the insights of these chapters together for a final reflection on how to maintain our humanity and our spiritual integrity in a technological world.
Letters to James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, and more by the famed monk, “one of the great American letter-writers of the century” (Kirkus Reviews). From 1948 until his death in 1968, Trappist monk and author of The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton corresponded with writers around the world, sharing with them his concerns about war, violence and repression, racism and injustice, and all forms of human aggression. Addressed to Evelyn Waugh, Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Walker Percy, Victoria Ocampo, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and others, this collection “reveals aspects of the monk that are seldom seen in literature apart from his letters” (Booklist). “Witty . . . confessional . . . insightful.” —The Boston Globe “Highly articulate and quietly inspirational.” —Publishers Weekly
The new democracies of the Southern Cone have publicly professed to reject and condemn the uses of the state power in various forms against citizens under military rule, thus dissociating themselves from their predecessors. And yet the experiences of military rule have become a grim legacy, raising major issues and dilemmas to the forefront of the public agenda. The Legacy of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay analyses in a systematic and comparative way the struggles and debates, the institutional paths and crises that took place in these societies following redemocratization in the 1980s and 1990s, as they confronted the legacy of violations committ...
We are becoming a nation of superficial and distracted consumers of instant messages and images, a state of being which does not aid engagement in religious and other deep commitments that require a sustained level of reflection and contemplation. In his thought-provoking work, Phillip M. Thompson analyses the shadow elements of technology - nuclear armaments, the bio-engineering of humans, and the distancing of humanity from the natural world - through the fascinating insights of the spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968). Merton's work offers an important critique and healing resource for contemporary, technology-saturated culture through constructive recommendations which inc...
Jesus in the Hands of Buddha is an enthralling memoir of Father Shigeto Oshida, a man who was at once a Japanese Zen Buddhist master and a Catholic Dominican priest. Guided by the hand of God and the Buddha dharma, he became the founder and director of the Takamori Hermitage in the Japanese Alps, a place where pilgrims have been drawn for decades. He was a unique pioneer in the encounter between religions East to West who felt he was led to the Catholic faith and the priesthood by a trick of God. Overwhelmed by the weight of European-styled Catholic culture inundating the Catholic Church in Japan, Oshida received permission from his superiors to strike out on his own and listen to the voice ...
Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine is a unique, unified, multi-genre work that includes dialogue, imaginary letters, poems, and reflective essays by two established Canadian poets. Taking cues from Merton himself, Susan and John establish a playful, jazzy, dialogic tone — superabundantly alive. This book invites participation for those who already know Merton’s work and for those who are meeting this whole and broken, prophetic, whimsical, paradoxical prophet and visionary for the first time. Robert Lax once described Merton’s poetry and the man himself as “superabundantly alive.” McCaslin and Porter prove the truth of this description in their enchanting account of the writer-mystic who now comes into his second century of stature and significance, in the words of Boris Pasternak, “[a]live and burning to the end.
Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective problematizes different aspects of the renewal and development of the short story. The aim of this collection is to explore the most recent theoretical issues raised by the short story as a genre and to offer theoretical and practical perspectives on the form. Centering as it does on specific authors and on the wider implications of short story poetics, this collection presents a new series of essays that both reinterpret canonical writers of the genre and advance new critical insights on the most recent trends and contemporary authors. Theorizations about genre reflect on different aspects of the short story from a multiplicity of per...
In exploring the role of Catholic intellectuals in engaging science and technology in the twentieth century, this book initially provides a background context for this evolution by examining the Modernism crisis in the first chapter. In order to unpack the subsequent evolution, Thompson then concentrates in separate chapters on the distinctive contributions of four specific Catholic intellectuals, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), and Thomas Merton (1915-1968). All of these intellectuals experienced some degree of official restraint in their efforts but through their distinctive intellectual trajectories, they contributed to a different engagement of the Church with science and technology. In the final chapters, the book first reviews the changes within the institutional Church in the twentieth century toward science and technology. Finally, it then applies some key ideals of the four intellectuals to anneal and extend John Paul II's approach of "critical openness" to suggest how the Church can now engage science and technology.
The sacramental and prophetic traditions of Christian spirituality, suggests Matthew Eggemeier, possess critical resources for responding to the contemporary social crises of widespread ecological degradation and the innocent suffering of the crucified poor. In A Sacramental-Prophetic Vision, Eggemeier maintains that the vital key for cultivating these traditions in the present is to situate these spiritualities in the context of spiritual exercises or ascetical practices that enable Christians to live more deeply in the presence of God (coram Deo) and in turn to make this presence visible in a suffering world.
The first biography of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, the author of the international bestsellers The Savage Detectives and 2666 How to know the man behind works of fiction so prone to extravagance? In the first biography of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, journalist Mónica Maristain tracks Bolaño from his childhood in Chile to his youth in Mexico and his early infatuation with literature, to years of tremendous literary productivity in Spain, and to his untimely death and the posthumous and unprecedented stardom that came with the international publication of his novels The Savage Detectives and 2666. Bolaño: A Biography in Conversations is assembled from a series of rich i...