Thinking through Thomas Merton: Contemplation for Contemporary Times

by Robert Inchausti

With the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Thomas Merton became a bestselling author, writing about spiritual contemplation in a modern context. Although Merton (1915–1968) lived as a Trappist monk, he advocated a spiritual life that was not a retreat from the world, but an alternative to it, particularly to the deadening materialism and spiritual vacuity of the postwar West. Over the next twenty years, Merton wrote for a wide audience, bringing the wisdom of Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism into dialogue with the period's contemporary thought.

In Thinking through Thomas Merton , Robert Inchausti introduces readers to Merton and evaluates his continuing relevance for our time. Inchausti shows how Merton broke the high modernist trance so that we might become the change we wish to see in the world by refiguring the lost virtues of silence, contemplation, and community in a world enamored by the will to power, virtuoso performance, radical skepticism, and materialist metaphysics. Merton's defense of contemplative culture is considered in light of the postmodern thought of recent years and emerges as a compelling alternative.

182 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 14, 2014

About the author

Born in Sacramento, California, Robert (Larry) Inchausti attended Sacramento State University and received his Ph.D. in English from The University of Chicago. Robert is the author of several books, the editor of two anthologies of Thomas Merton's writings, and another an of Beat Literature titled: "Hard to be a Saint in the City" was selected as one of the best books of 2017 by The Advocate. His first book "The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People" was nominated for a National Book Award by his publisher SUNY Press. And his book on classroom teaching, "Spitwad Sutras" is taught in teacher education programs across the USA. He is an Emeritus English Professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

"I am bourgeois to the core and plebeian beyond belief, and yet I am drawn to great writers and thinkers as my anti-type, my shadow, the voice of genius I never possessed. So I don't think of myself as a teacher or a writer so much as "an impersonator of profundities" inhabiting the wisdom of texts in the naked confidence that the value of the thoughts I express transcend the particular fraud that I am the one espousing them. It doesn't bother me when nobody seems to notice what I have to say because those anonymous, silent readers I know nothing about-- who value my books for their own personal reasons-- are enough to keep me going --- living on the wings of borrowed metaphors."