Bücher von Thomas Merton

Chuang Tse ist neben Lao Tse der bedeutendste Vertreter der taoistischen Lehre. Er veranschaulichte vor über 2000 Jahren in kurzen Geschichten, Gleichnissen und Anekdoten, Allegorien und Paradoxien, dass wahres Glück und wirkliche Freiheit nur im Verständnis des Tao, des Weges und im Verweilen in der Einheit zu finden sind. So verbreitete Chuang Tse die Ideen Lao Tses - dessen Historizität nicht gesichert ist - und gilt als Wegbereiter einer Lehre, die sich später im Zusammenspiel mit dem Buddhismus zu dem entwickeln sollte, was wir heute als Zen kennen. Thomas Merton verbrachte einige Jahre damit, verschiedene Übersetzungen der chinesischen Klassiker zu studieren, die Chuang Tse zugeschrieben werden und daraus eigene, poetische Bearbeitungen zu erstellen. Das Ergebnis ist diese Sammlung von Texten, die Thomas Merton selbst als persönlichen Favoriten unter den zahlreichen von ihm verfassten Büchern bezeichnete.Seine Heiligkeit der 14. Dalai Lama ist das politische und spirituelle Oberhaupt Tibets. Thomas Merton begegnete ihm während seiner Asien-Reise einige Wochen vor seinem Tod 1968.

In this third volume of papers from Thomas Merton¿s conferences during his decade (1955-1965) as novice master at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani, his insight into the liturgical pattern of the Christian year and beyond is presented in fresh detail. Merton¿s own commitment to this central dimension of Christian life is clear, and nowhere more so than in his work introducing students to the patterns that would mark their lives as monks.Though dating from the period just before the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, Merton's commentaries remain pertinent. The thoroughly annotated text is preceded by an extensive introduction situating this material in the context of Merton's lifelong writing on liturgy. Moreover, as his former student Br. Paul Quenon notes in his foreword, this context is one deeply rooted in Merton¿s understanding of Scripture. ¿These notes . . . take us into one man's lifetime of reflection and seasoned experience of the Church Year.¿

Previously unpublished material from world-renowned Trappist monk and author, Thomas Merton, featuring the final conference talks given in the United States before his untimely death. In May and October of 1968, Thomas Merton offered two extended conferences at Our Lady of the Redwoods Abbey, a Cistercian women's community in Northern California. Comprising over twenty-six hours of previously unpublished material, Thomas Merton in California covers a variety of topics including ecology and consciousness, yoga and Hinduism, Native American ritual and rites of passage, Sufi spirituality, and inter-religious dialogue, along with extended discussions on prayer and the contemplative life. The material presented in these talks reveals Merton's wide-ranging intellectual and spiritual pursuits in the final year of his life, and fills a long-standing lacuna around Merton's visits to Redwoods Monastery, forming a necessary bridge to the Asian journey that was to come. Practical and applicable, as well as searching and inspired, Thomas Merton in California is essential for Merton readers and scholars, and all those interested in deepening their spiritual lives.

Thomas Merton presented numerous sets of conferences during his decade (1955-1965) as novice master at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani. The two courses included in this volume - a thorough examination of the book of Genesis that began in mid-1956 and concluded on the Feast of Pentecost in 1957, and a series of classes on the book of Exodus from 1957 and 1958 - are here presented for the first time in a critical edition accompanied by extensive annotation and a comprehensive introduction. These courses comprise the only major surviving teaching notes on particular books of Scripture dating from the years when Merton was in charge of the novitiate. They provide direct access to his views on the intellectual and spiritual contexts in which they should be understood. As biblical scholar Pauline Viviano writes in her preface, ¿this edition of Thomas Merton¿s class notes brings us into the workings of a great spiritual leader¿s mind as he reflects upon Scripture. . . . all who are on a spiritual journey can gain from his insights and the lessons he draws.¿

In "Bread in the Wilderness," Merton looks at the psalms as poetry; in this book he regards them as prayer. Guiding the reader through the more representative psalms, he explains why the Church also considers the psalms as the best way to praise God. According to Merton: "To put it very plainly, the Church loves the Psalms because in them she sings of her experience of God, of her union with the Incarnate Word, of her contemplation of God in the Mystery of Christ....If we really come to know and love the Psalms, we will enter into the Church's own experience of divine things. We will begin to know God as we ought.

2014 Reprint of 1956 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In "Bread in the Wilderness," Merton looks at the psalms as poetry; in this book he regards them as prayer. Guiding the reader through the more representative psalms, he explains why the Church also considers the psalms as the best way to praise God. According to Merton:"To put it very plainly, the Church loves the Psalms because in them she sings of her experience of God, of her union with the Incarnate Word, of her contemplation of God in the Mystery of Christ....If we really come to know and love the Psalms, we will enter into the Church's own experience of divine things. We will begin to know God as we ought." (pg.9)

Thomas Merton may have seemed an unlikely candidate for a best-selling author. Cloistered in a remote Kentucky monastery, Merton struggled as a young man to reconcile the contemplative life he sought as a monk and his very public passion for writing. Publisher James Laughlin saw Merton's talent and played the muse, encouraging him with the poems, essays, and diaries of other writers and publishing nearly everything Merton sent in return.Ironically, the very society Merton rejected upon entering the monastery embraced his work, bringing him publishing success only dreamed of by more eager authors. Soon Merton discovered he had a podium, a voice, and a responsibility that weighed as heavily on him as his previous quest for silence. Laughlin's encouragement remained constant throughout, as political ally, publishing adviser, and supporting friend.Nearly thirty years of rich correspondence documents this strong literary and personal relationship and traces the remarkable development of Merton's vision: from an early focus on matters internal and religious, to a tremendous world view encompassing issues of race, politics, war, and the spiritual decay of modern society.

Now in paperback, revised and redesigned: This is Thomas Merton's last book, in which he draws on both Eastern and Western traditions to explore the hot topic of contemplation/meditation in depth and to show how we can practice true contemplation in everyday life. Never before published except as a series of articles (one per chapter) in an academic journal, this book on contemplation was revised by Merton shortly before his untimely death. The material bridges Merton's early work on Catholic monasticism, mysticism, and contemplation with his later writing on Eastern, especially Buddhist, traditions of meditation and spirituality. This book thus provides a comprehensive understanding of contemplation that draws on the best of Western and Eastern traditions. Merton was still tinkering with this book when he died; it was the book he struggled with most during his career as a writer. But now the Merton Legacy Trust and experts have determined that the book makes such a valuable contribution as his major comprehensive presentation of contemplation that they have allowed its publication.

The Private MertonThis intensely personal book from the ultimate spiritual writer of our time shows his contemplative and devotional side through his prayers and rarely seen drawings. Capturing the quiet epiphanies in the life of a Trappist monk who was a celebrated writer and activist, this volume offers a glimpse into a lesser-known side of this timeless explorer of the life of the soul.

Merton defines Christian mysticism, especially as expressed by the Spanish Carmelite St. John of the Cross, and he offers the contemplative experience as an answer to the irreligion and barbarism of our times. ?For those...curious about mysticism...this is an excellent book? (Catholic World).

The journal kept by Merton during 1964 and 1965, containing his daily meditations during the crucial and difficult period in which the permission he had awaited so long -- to live alone in his hermitage -- was finally given. These pages reveal his reflections as a hermit on the joys and dangers of a life of solitude in the woods.

The writings in this work were precipitated by a variety of events during the last decades of Merton's life - the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s among them. His timeless moral integrity and tireless concern for nonviolent solutions to war are eloquently expressed.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is one of the foremost spiritual thinkers of the twentieth century. Though he lived a mostly solitary existence as a Trappist monk, he had a dynamic impact on world affairs through his writing. An outspoken proponent of the antiwar and civil rights movements, he was both hailed as a prophet and castigated for his social criticism. He was also unique among religious leaders in his embrace of Eastern mysticism, positing it as complementary to the Western sacred tradition. Merton is the author of over forty books of poetry, essays, and religious writing, including Mystics and Zen Masters, and The Seven Story Mountain, for which he is best known. His work continues to be widely read to this day.

"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 innocent. He wants to do what he thinks he must not do, without the pain of worrying about the consequences.""The history of our time has been made by dictators whose characters, often transparently easy to read, have been full of repressed guilt. They have managed to enlist the support of masses of men moved by the same repressed drives as themselves.""Modern dictatorships display everywhere a deliberate and calculated hatred for human nature as such. The technique of degradation used in concentration camps and in staged trials are all too familiar in our time. They have one purpose: to defile the human person."

An examination of the roots of the Cistercian Order, founded in 1098, its development and waning, and the seventeenth-century reforms by the Abbé de Rancé, which began the second flowering that continues today. Throughout, Merton illuminates the purposes of monasticism. Index; photographs.

This unique spiritual autobiography is the account of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man whose search for peace and faith eventually leads him, at the age of twenty-six, to take vows in one of the most demanding religious orders - the Trappists. At the monastery, and within the "four walls of my new freedom, " Merton wrote this extraordinary testament - a document of a man who withdrew from the world only after he had fully immersed himself in it. For this Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, Robert Giroux has written a memoir of how he came to publish The Seven Storey Mountain, and Merton's distinguished biographer, William H. Shannon, has supplied a note for the reader.