Product Description
A compilation of sketches from the comedy series, "The Fast Show", featuring characters such as Ted and Ralph, coughing Bob Fleming, the "Suit you, sir" tailors from hell, and the bloke in the stupid hat. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE AND UNDENIABLE PROOFOF PACIFISM IN THE PRIEST AND PROPHET
This wonderful book has been stitched together from photographs which Father Merton took at a former Shaker settlement near Gethsemane, with a taped address to his Trappist novices and an article. It is supplemented with articles and photographs by the editor, Paul Pearson.

The photographs by Father Merton are stunningly beautiful and objects for contemplation in themselves, perfectly balanced, full of depth and great interest, if for the composition itself as well as the subject matter. They are icons of Peace.

One mild frustration, or challenge, is assuring which photos come from Father Merton and which from Pearson. The only way unfortunately is to consult the copyright page. As a published photographer I find Father Merton's photos far better than they ought to be, and beautiful. This is the other way to distinguish his from the editor's, who takes much more mundane photos. Father Merton's photos truly lead us into the mystical depths immanent in the reality of these old trees and leaves and old buildings and the space among them, and the furnishings within.

In short, the photos are great, and the writing from Father Merton sublime. This is an area Father Merton was exploring just prior to his tragic assassination in Asia, and we see here the first sketches of writings and speeches not intended for publication, yet the gestation of his thought and prayers. For this we are truly grateful to the great Roman Catholic publishing house Orbis Books for presenting this volume to the public, even if Father Merton might not have presented it in this way. Orbis, and Pearson, have truly done the best they can with the dry bones which were left behind, and given these bones flesh and life, as in the Old Testament prophecy, and we thank them for it.

Not as large as the typical over-sized coffee table book, but intended clearly for contemplation, and thus generously sized for a monk's reading plank. One simple page here is rich food for days of meditation; one photo for a life of meditation, and worthy of place upon a cell wall. Get two copies, one for reading and one for the wall!

Well worth adding to one's collection.
The first impulse of the reader of Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers might be to dismiss it as a coffee table book. It offers exquisite black and white photos and an admittedly short text. It is composed of a lengthy introduction, a couple of essays by Thomas Merton, and the transcript of a conference for novices which had been audio-taped more than forty years ago. It seems, initially, to be just another work capitalizing on the ongoing fascination with Merton's life and expansive interests. On the other hand, it represents a phase of his life which continues to be explored by scholars and general readers alike.

During the early 1960s, when Merton was photographing the Shaker buildings, chairs, wide yards, and shadowed windows displayed in this work, he had already entered the ecumenical and interreligious phase of his monastic life. As a young monk, he had studied and explicated the traditions of Christian monasticism and the contemplative quest for God in silence and simplicity. He had made real and attractive to a wide audience the hidden life structured around hours of prayer, straightforward work, and simple fare. In mid-life, though, he had launched into explorations of other traditions with which he felt affinity. It was in the early 1960s that he began to publish sayings of Gandhi, reflections from Chuang Tzu, and his own forays into Zen. He began to learn Japanese calligraphy and added illustrations to his work. His writings became more compressed, more episodic, more laced with koans.

It is fitting, then, that Thomas Merton's considerations of the Shaker life and spirit are offered in a small volume, similar in format to his publications on desert Fathers and Zen masters. This book bears resemblance to his forays into the East. Like them, the perspective and the observations are undeniably those of an American monk who was deeply in touch with the political and cultural stresses of the United States just past the mid-point of the twentieth century.

After an expanded introduction by editor Paul Pearson, the text by Merton offers us, in apt but brief observations, points for pondering about the Shakers. He remarks on: 1) the stark elegance of Shaker craft, in which he finds prayer-become-art form; 2) the dedication to quality, which he interprets as an act of reverence to the ideal of community, an ideal which demands the ultimate in serviceability and simple pleasure for the sake of the other; 3) the Shaker impulse to realized eschatology, which Merton finds in the Shakers' faith that a heavenly life could be lived in the here and now. It is probably a sign of Merton's times that he merely acknowledges, rather than plumbs, the Shakers' unique belief that their inspired founder, Ann Lee, was an incarnation of God-of the Holy Spirit.

Merton's sense of the transitory and the ironic is present in the book, as it was increasingly in the writings which preceded his untimely death in 1968. He pays tribute to a religious experiment which can be read as both success and failure. The success of the Shakers, as Merton sees it, is the fact that their genius lives on in a style, a now-classic American craft, and in the practical resourcefulness that invented sewing machines and other homey, efficient items. A further success is that they developed and lived a variation on a way of life that persists, in various ways and in various faiths. Their ideals are, by and large, those which drove the Trappists who preceded them and the Taize community which came long after them. The Shakers were celibate, contemplative, and cenobitic. As Merton himself expresses it: "I feel deeply related to them in some kind of obscure communion" (p. 113). They tapped, as far as Merton is concerned, a universal impulse to counter-cultural, Spirit-driven community. The same affinities that attracted him to Zen monasticism piqued his interest in the Shakers: their passion for quality, their renunciation of the worldly, their steadfastness in living according to the dictates of their own passion and perceptions, their undeterred spiritual quest. For Merton, the Shakers provided a still meaningful, and thus successful, example of fidelity unto death.

Merton speaks of the Shakers' "Edenic innocence" (p. 79), their search for the "truth" of any work (pp. 97-98), their "prophetic function" in society (p. 112), and their obedience to "the law of all spiritual life [which] is the law of risk and struggle" (p. 117). The final comment from Merton, in this recently edited collection, is a bittersweet tribute. It is here that the failure mixed with their success comes in: "The Shakers apprehended something totally original about the spirit and vocation of America. . . . The sobering thing is that their vision was eschatological! And they themselves ended" (p. 122).

This little book provides a snapshot of the Shakers' life, their drive for perfection, and their desire to be earthly citizens of heaven and heavenly citizens of earth. It is interesting, well done, and worth adding to one's collection of works by or on Merton and on American spiritual traditions. ... Read more

Product Description
In these essays, talks, and a stunning selection of his own photographs, Thomas Merton hauntingly evokes the spirituality of a uniquely American sect. Largely remembered today for a legacy of extraordinary craftsmanship, the Shakers espoused a way of life, as Merton shows, with surprising relevance for today. In their approach to work as a form of worship, in their practice of community, their simplicity and rejection of violence, and their profound witness to the Kingdom of God, Merton finds lessons for all Christians. In the Shakers prophetic departure from the American myth of progress, efficiency, and individualism, he finds a message of enduring value for our time. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Economist, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2006. The length of the article is 17242 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Paul Samuelson and financial economics.(Biography)
Author: Robert C. Merton
Publication: American Economist (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 50Issue: 2Page: 9(23)

Article Type: Biography

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Product Description
The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God

In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."

A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.
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Customer Reviews (29)

Admirable, Yet Confusing
This book combines biographical sketches of four Catholic writers (Day, Merton, O'Connor and Percy) with literary criticism of their writings.Paul Elie, the author, does this from the perspective of a Catholic analyzing the lives and writings of four other Catholic writers whom he respected and admired.

Every reader will take away their own impressions. Mine are these.

Re: Dorothy Day -I would not have liked her as a person. I sense that she was cold and aloof as well as strident and uncompromising.On the other hand, she is eminently admirable and Iadmired the way she combined heroic social action with a profound interior spiritual life.

Re: Thomas Merton - I see him now as an escapist par excellence. He sought to escape the world by going to Gethsemani; then, he sought to escape Gethsemani; then he sought to escape Western monasticism. A perpetually unhappy and unsatisfied man, and at the same time one who constantly strove to be "connected" and "relevant" to all the 'movers and shakers' of his time. An unlikeable man, but one of deep faith and a genuine man of letters.

Re: Flannery O'Connor - A woman of dazzling honesty, a loner at heart, humble, yet proud, too. By far, the most interesting of the four.Both as a writer and as a person, she was the most profound. Plus, an admirable woman in every regard.

Re: Walker Percy - In terms of personality, the bourbon-loving Percy was the most approachable by far.An ordinary man and an ordinary 'believer,' but with a huge talent for fiction.I liked himand like his writings the best.

To his credit, I give Paul Elie high marks for even-handedness in this long interpretative and evaluative essay.He is obviously fond, and rightly so, of all four.It is a fair and full book, and best of all, it motivates readers such as myself to read more ( and more intelligently) of the fine writings of these four authors.

Thomas Merton Complete

Elie's research on the life of Thomas Merton-- complied books, journals, first hand accounts, and more--- documented a being on the way to the enlightnment that no religion can claim.
This single track, alone, through the book is for all seekers.

Recommended for honest searchers
I bought this book because I am a devotee of Flannery O'Connor, and I have read and been enchanted by both Merton's and Day's autobiographies.The author's approach to the lives of these four Catholic writers is unique and seems at first to be somewhat of a stretch.The connections between most of them are tenuous at best - Merton and Day had a long-running correspondence, but O'Connor only was only ever in direct contact with Percy, for instance.However, the connections they made during their lives, though interesting, are not really the point of this book.What the four really had in common was their writing, religion, and their approach to similar themes during an overlapping era, as well as the enduring influences that they had on each other and on other writers (the author mentions John Kennedy Toole, etc.).

All four sought to define through their work the roll that religion plays in the modern worldand in their own lives, and this book gives a particularly insightful and well analyzed overview of how each of them went about this all-important task.The author has clearly done a great deal of research.The contemporary commentary he includes about each author is fascinating.

This book was particularly interesting to me because I am quite familiar with most of Flannery O'Connor's work, and it was wonderful to finally be able to connect her stories to her life and to the time and place she was writing from.

I highly recommend this to all searchers, and to those interested in that which is mysterious in life and religion.This book should be read by all people interested in Catholicism in America, religion in the modern work, and in literature or American History in general.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own
An excellent read, the livesof Merton,Day,Percy and O Connor beautifully melded and yet distinct.I highly recomend this book for all lovers of literature as well as Christians.

"Predicament shared in common"
Inevitably, the attempt to merge four writers into one narrative that reviews their correspondence, books, essays, pronouncements, talks, and travels makes for an ambitious if uneven journey. Percy's Christian existentialism by contrast with his determinedly contrary if congenitally eccentric fellow Southerner O'Connor's keen eye and bitter comedy comes off as aloof, bookish, and not that interesting if by no fault of his own. His novels nearly all pale by comparison with her best fiction, and Elie has difficulty making some of his lesser novels even minimally engaging.

Day, by contrast with Merton, herself suffers from asceticism! While the two converts and one-time near counterparts in NYC progressive political and au courant literati circles in the years between the wars (albeit at some remove from each other's direct influence and circles of friends) share roots in what we'd call the typical avant-garde movements of Modernism and experimentation that generally any bright young thing in an urban East Coast environment has wandered into over our past decades, Day comes across as markedly more inflexible, so as to anchor her pacifist and anarchist commitment to individual choice to live the Gospel as "fools for Christ" must. Merton learns by contrast to adjust whether to his moral shifts before he entered the Trappists, his infatuation with the Abbey of Gethsemani and his sudden fame after he wrote his memoir, his diagnosis by a shrink as a "narcissist hermit," and his love affair with a nurse in the mid-1960s just as so many of his clerical colleagues were reneging on their vows and falling in love themselves with women rather than, or as well as, their calling to separate themselves from the ties that bind most of us, or used to.

Elie makes the best out of the enormous secondary criticism that has accrued around O'Connor, and of the correspondence and previously censored material now available to Merton scholars. He gives instructive close readings of "Wise Blood" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge" as well as contrasting the letters to Elizabeth Hester that show her public manner as preserved for posterity vs. hints of a more combative and much less PC Jim Crow-era attitude in her letters to Maryat Lee. The hints of what happened to Robert Lowell as a result of his manic visions of God and Caroline Gordon's own descent into a rigid form of Catholic scrupulosity needed more detail, however. Percy's life fails to emerge, and his family and career shimmer only vaguely throughout. Also, we have almost no sense of what Flannery did in college or during her MFA years in Iowa City, not to mention her own NYC stint prior to her diagnosis for lupus. I wanted more connection of her own urban flourishing to tie in to Merton's previous trajectory there, and Day's own movement away from the secular boho to the Catholic boho contigent, but perhaps such tracks remain too vague for serious biographers to retrace or imagine.

Well-chosen photos: young Percy strolling a German rustic trail, Day in the Bob Fitch snapshot of her sitting defiantly as two sheriffs loom to arrest her at a UFW rally, O'Connor radiant as she holds a new copy of "Wise Blood," Merton slouching in a straw hat and kicking back against a bench on the day of his ordination. These enliven these writers, too often reduced to small book jacket photos we have seen perhaps too often.

Percy appears genial if gloomy. The loss of much of his correspondence, unlike the stacks of carbons that fill up the enormous epistolary collection "The Habit of Being " for O'Connor and the letters and diaries for Merton posthumously published may explain Percy's diminished presence vs. his other two rivals for literary and spiritual audiences. Day seems not to be much interested in writing even though she dutifully published her memoir, carefully glossed as was Merton's for a more reticent era, "The Long Loneliness." Day early on appears to have chosen a lifestyle and a manner committed to renunciation of her own early fling, her sexual adventurism (although by our standards she and Merton are the norm, more or less, for those raised less religiously at least today), and her flirtation with Marxist and leftist movements. I like Merton's advice around the time of the grandstanding Berrigan Brothers agitprop: "I think the best thing is to belong to a universal anti-movement underground." (qtd. 396)

Elie is at his best in this section, as he shows how Day separated herself from the peacenik hippie priests and those playing to the camera while "the whole world is watching" in the later 60s for revolution that made Jesus a proto-Che. Elie explains that Day took pains to empathize with the other side, always, and not to place any dogma or manifesto between her and her identification with those who may have not wanted war in Vietnam but who could not be led to sympathize with guitar-strumming hippies and angry clerics spilling napalm and blood on shredded draft documents as cameras rolled. Merton, too, as Elie takes great care in documenting, struggled to be a leader of the Catholic reformers and the progressive left from his hermitage on the Abbey grounds where civil rights organizers and leftist luminaries made their own pilgrimages to meet with him and where he attempted to stay in touch from behind the monastery walls with a world that he knew needed his advice even as he vowed to stay faithful, at terrible and necessary personal cost, to his promises to remain a loyal priest and obedient monk. Merton too shrank from the violence that inspired young people to immolate themselves as burnt offerings against the war, and soon enough he too would meet in his sudden death "the Christ of the burnt ones" to whom he ended his memoir "The Seven Story Mountain".

O'Connor, being like Merton the more familiar of the four writers, comes across like him as the one you might like to meet and chat with, although unlike Fr. Louis I would fear reading about myself in her letters after the fact. Day's harder to make appealing, as her severity and devotion to seeing the Lord in the shattered ones kept her focused upon the less prosaic and less easily dramatized side of life that eschews sentimentality and exalts the utterly assured recognition of the Messiah in the poor and the crazed and deluded ones. Her choice, despite the convulsions of the Catholic Worker Movement and the fact that she could rarely find the time alone that Percy, Merton, and O'Connor needed to become speakers to the rest of us, "making oratory out of solitude," does make her active apostolate all the more admirable.

I conclude with a couple of passages. Elie compares O'Connor with Merton, Day, and Percy. Discussing an admittedly unlikely essay anthology in the tumultuous days of '69, "Mystery & Manners," Elie describes how she combined "objectivity and fierce personal conviction," speaking out of "aloneness and absoluteness," and how her Southern allegiance in the North, as "a believer in a disbelieving literary society," as "an artist in a church of philistines," transcends loneliness or alienation. What she and her fellow writers share is what all believers today share: "the aloneness of the religious believer generally." (426) She knows faith, the "substance for things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as I paraphrase the old Baltimore Catechism (as Elie I recall did much earlier in his book).

If O'Connor derived her power from her inflexibility, Elie continues, Merton by his sudden death escaped the end-time days of rage constant upendings of the 60s. His fluidity enabled him "to represent and call forth the aspirations of others." (427)

Elie finds his appeal in his "radical identification of himself with another" that evoked in his readers a similar identification. Merton was able to mature and recognize that his smarts, his charism, his desire for the spotlight could be used to turn attention from himself as the bestselling contemplative, the talkative monk, the literary talent submitting his work to censors (well, at least most of the time--the love letters he sent his nurse Margie notwithstanding, and showing the humanity that endured and made him ultimately a better monk and a kinder Christian at again what must have been enormous sacrifice and, at fifty-two, having to "grow up" even more). He had the gift of getting us to feel as if we were in his sandals, observing wryly and compassionately and righteously what he could see from beyond the walls around his hermitage, and beneath his own defenses within himself, schooled as he was in all the trends of the literati at the shrink.

A year and a half before his death, Merton in the thick of the antiwar campaigns addressed his brothers outside the monastery. Reading Camus, Merton came to realize the existential predicament for the believer mattered as much as for those like Camus who could not return to believe what they had left behind. Merton reflects in the letter to his superiors that he has moved beyond the "answers" that his early years in the monastery once led him to think that he had gained.

"Can a man make sense of his existence? Can a man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? [. . . .] I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man' s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and which one learns that only experience counts." (qtd. 402)

This journey into the arid regions impels the monk. He leaves the world's distractions to concentrate upon the battle within, and behind the defenses of the cloister he stands vulnerable "to remain open to God wholly and directly." Whether God answers is not up to the monk. Merton finds God must be known, not proven. "To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes."

Elie on the last page sums up how these four writers' predicament is now that of any believer, half a century and more now since these four writers thought and argued and prayed. Elie insists that they all knew what any believer or unbeliever today knows: authority lies not on the institutional Church or a social monolith commanding conformity to the Magisterium. Elie imagines a reform of today, for assimilating or uncertain Catholics, or anyone "quasi-religious," might be abandoning the idea of a true faith. Elie tells us now that "clear lines of orthodoxy are made crooked by our experiences and complicated by our lives." (472)

All of us look for signs. Readers, we are trained to and thrive by our own pilgrimage for meaning. Elie notes that "the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs." Now we have the testimony of Day and O'Connor, Merton and Percy, who all had to balance their unwanted label as "Catholic writers" or intellectuals in thrall to the Vatican with their own real tensions and longings and upsets. They imagined their own afflictions and some made poems and fiction out of it, others and other times these became editorials, letters, diaries, and conversations. And, the four new evangelists all witness to us, as evangels, messengers, of the pilgrimages they too stumbled through as their narratives ended.
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Product Description
By meditating on personal examples from the author's life, as well as reflecting on the inspirational life and writings of Thomas Merton, stories from the Gospels, as well as the lives of other holy men and women (among them, Henri Nouwen, Therese of Lisieux and Pope John XXIII) the reader will see how becoming who you are, and becoming the person that God created, is a simple path to happiness, peace of mind and even sanctity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

Becoming Who You Are
I can only wonder at the ignorance of Catholic teaching of this Catholic priest.Is it on purpose or is he truly so badly catechized?His interpretations of Jesus' awareness of Himself are absolutely NOT in line with what the Church teaches.To suggest that Jesus did not know who he was, didn't always want to embrace his "true self", was surprised by his first miracle, didn't know if he'd rise from the dead, didn't know what new life would be given to us, became more confident in his ministry as time went on, etc....is HERESY.

getting to know yourself
This book helped me to understand the day to day elements of God's plan for me.

simple, thoughtful, inspiring
After two readings, this book will sit on my nightstand for a third.Martin's approach is simple - which is not to say easy.It is a wonderful meditation, and I expect that I will continue to get something new and inspiring from every re-reading.Meanwhile, the book has given me a whole new reading list ofbooks on a variety of related subjects including Mertin, Nouwen and others.

not what I thought it would be
When this book started taking a tone that didn't sound like Catholicism, I googled the author's name and saw a few articles online and saw why the book was taking that turn.I think I would rather read the works of Thomas Merton on their own than have them colored with liberal interpretation.This will be going back to the thrift store.

A Book Worth Sharing again and again
James Martin has given us another book worth sharing with family and friends of all ages.I most highly recommend it. ... Read more

Product Description
What a glorious, all-satisfying country this Nevada desert would be, if one were only all eyes, and had no need of food, drink, and shelter! Would n't it, Miss Dwyer? Do you know, I 've no doubt that this is the true location of heaven. You see, the lack of water and vegetation would be no inconvenience to spirits, while the magnificent scenery and the cloudless sky would be just the thing to make them thrive.
... Read more