The fourth volume of Thomas Merton's complete journals, one of his final literary legacies, springs from three hundred handwritten pages that capture - in candid, lively, deeply revealing passages -- the growing unrest of the 1960s, which Merton witnessed within himself as plainly as in the changing culture around him.

In these decisive years, 1960-1963, Merton, now in his late forties and frequently working in a new hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani, finds himself struggling between his longing for a private, spiritual life and the irresistible pull of social concerns. Precisely when he longs for more solitude, and convinces himself he could not cut back on his writing, Merton begins asking complex questions about the contemporary culture ("the 'world' with its funny pants, of which I do not know the name, its sandals and sunglasses"), war, and the churches role in society.

Thus despite his resistance, he is drawn into the world where his celebrity and growing concerns for social issues fuel his writings on civil rights, nonviolence, and pacifism and lead him into conflict with those who urge him to leave the moral issues to bishops and theologians.

This pivotal volume in the Merton journals reveals a man at the height of a brilliant writing career, marking the fourteenth anniversary of his priesthood but yearning still for the key to true happiness and grace. Here, in his most private diaries, Merton is as intellectually curious, critical, and insightful as in his best-known public writings while he documents his movement from the cloister toward the world, from Novice Master to hermit, from ironic critic to joyous witness to the mystery of God's plan.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk, writer and peace activist. His spiritual classics include New Seeds of Contemplation, The Sign of Jonas, Mystics and Zen Masters and The Seven Story Mountain

This collection of interviews supplements "Conversations with Walker Percy" and occasions an additional two dozen pleasurable encounters with Percy. Primarily from the last ten years of Percys life, they show how his presence was stimulating thought in much of humanistic America, in literature, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and in cultural life in general.

Although this acclaimed author of "The Moviegoer, Lancelot, " and "Love in the Ruins" never overcame his shyness with interviewers, he continued to grant interviews as long as his health permitted. This act of openness illustrates his humility before his ideas and his desire to help others understand them.

The interviews in this collection show him at a height when he knew that his illness would not allow him to write any more books, and that the only way to restate his ideas and offer a valediction to the large audience to whom he had always been kind, patient, and appreciative was to speak out. Percy d

These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers.

These twenty-seven interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, "The Moviegoer," in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton.

This volume is the second in the "Literary Conversations" series. These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.

This book consists of papers presented at a conference organized and chaired by Edward K. Kaplan of Brandeis University, held at Adath Jeshurun Synagogue in Louisville, Kentucky in February 2002, sponsored by the Thomas Merton Foundation, plus additional material, including essays, journal entries, letters, poetry, news reports, and church documents. Some contributors are Jewish, others Christian. The topic is Merton's relation to Jewish friends and correspondents (prominent authors and rabbis) and his leadership in the context of an awakening on the part of the Christian Church to the grievousness of its long persecution and rejection of the Jewish people. The keynote presentation is by James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword, who traces his own awakening under Merton's guidance as typical of his generation. In the middle of the book we have Merton's correspondence with Jewish colleagues and the complete interchange between Merton and Abraham Joshua Heschel during the time when Heschel was an invited observer/adviser at Vatican II. The history of the development of the Council's Declaration on the Jews, Nostra Aetate, is treated in some detail with news reports and other materials and the four versions of the Declaration itself carried in the appendix with analysis and commentary, plus important sequents up to the present time.

Merton is critiqued for too quickly shifting attention from the experience of the Jewish people themselves to the guilt (or otherwise) of the Christians; several papers debate this. Nevertheless he is presented as making a significant opening to reverent appreciation of Judaism past and present as he aspires to be--or claims to be--"a true Jew under myCatholic skin." His characteristically strong feelings are revealed in journal entries and letters and a transcription of a lecture to the Gethsemani monks. He discusses with his Jewish friends topics such as retelling tales, writing and translating poetry, and the spiritual experience of reading the Bible. Several essays deal with Merton and his Jewish parallels as spiritual teachers, prophets, and activists, "heretics of modernity."

The book draws to a close with the renewal issues of pluralism, of which Merton was a forerunner; Hasidism, to which he was attracted and which is becoming popular again now; and a transcription of an interview with Merton's friend Jewish Renewal leader, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.