Survival or prophecy? : the letters of Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq ; edited by Patrick Hart ; foreword by Rembert G. Weakland
"Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, spent his literary career in a cloistered monastery in Kentucky. His great counterpart, the French Benedictine monk Jean Leclercq, traveled relentlessly to and from monasteries world-wide, trying to bring about a long-needed reform and renewal of Catholic religious life." "Their correspondence over twenty years is a record of the common yearnings of two holy men. "What is a monk?" is the question at the center of their exchange, and in these letters they answer it with great aplomb, touching on the role of ancient texts and modern conveniences; the advantages of hermit life and community life; the fierce Catholicism of the monastic past and the new openness to the approaches of other traditions; the monastery's impulse toward survival and the monk's calling to prophecy. Full of learning, human insight, and self-deprecating wit, these letters capture the excitement of the Catholic Church in the era of the Second Vatican Council - and the perennial appeal of the life of monastic solitude."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2002
1st ed
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2002