Make Peace before the Sun Goes Down: The Long Encounter of Thomas Merton and His Abbot, James Fox-Fast Shipping

Description

Afascinating account of Thomas Merton’s conflicted relationship with hisabbot, Dom James Fox—by an esteemed modern Merton scholar.

In the1950s and ’60s, Thomas Merton, a monk of the Trappist monastery ofGethsemani in Kentucky, published a string of books that are among themost influential spiritual books of the twentieth century–including themega-best seller The Seven-Storey Mountain. He was something of arock star for a cloistered monk, and from his monastic cell he enjoyed awide and lively correspondence with people from the worlds of religion,literature, and politics. During that period he also explored and wroteextensively on Buddhism, Sufism, art, and social action. The man towhom he owed obedience in the cloistered life was a much moretraditional Catholic, his abbot, Dom James Fox. To say that these twomen had a conflicted relationship would be an understatement, but thetension their differences in orientation brought actually led tocreative results on both sides and to a kind of hard-won respect andlove. Roger Lipsey’s portrait of this unusual relationship is compellingand moving; it shows Merton in the years his imagination was taking himfar beyond the walls of the monastery, and eventually, literally toAsia.