Survival or Prophecy?
Subtitle: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean LeClercq
Contributors: Leclercq, Jean, 1911-; Hart, Patrick.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
Subjects: Merton, Thomas, -- 1915-1968 -- Correspondence; Leclercq, Jean, -- 1911-1993 -- Correspondence; Trappists -- United States -- Correspondence; Benedictines -- Luxembourg -- Correspondence; Monastic and religious life
Genres: Correspondence.; Correspondence
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.