Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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Foreword by Peter Ellis

Theology scholars have entry to the widest of fields of any discipline and see before them the largest number of paths to follow. The language they use offers so many different registers of meaning and so many opportunities for truthfully moving from one to the other that they often find themselves the surprised beneficiaries of hitherto unknown combinations of words and ideas. Many paths lead them to where others are working or have been before them. But it is also possible to take paths that are entirely new, that perhaps are marking out the first clearings in unknown forests or establishing possible meeting places in lonely unexplored landscapes. This volume presents the work of one such scholar of the new, Sonia Petisco, who has followed her own distinct path for over a decade. Her guiding light here is the Catholic monk Thomas Merton who died in 1968 and the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this year. Merton’s life was paradigmatic of the breakdowns of the twentieth century, and, fortunately for us, the changes he experienced in his thoughts and acts were recorded by him in an early autobiography, almost daily journal entries, letters and books. They record his flight from a world of cruelty, individual isolation and war to the age-old practice of monasticism as lived out in the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, USA. Gradually over the years Merton reconnected with the world and became one of the great counter-cultural protest voices of the 1960s. Part of his increasing commitment to and enmeshment in the world was his writing of poetry which more and more pushed out at the boundaries of form as he matured.

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