Make peace before the sun goes down - Roger Lipsey

A
fascinating account of Thomas Merton's conflicted relationship with his
abbot, Dom James Fox-by an esteemed modern Merton scholar.

In the
1950s and '60s, Thomas Merton, a monk of the Trappist monastery of
Gethsemani in Kentucky, published a string of books that are among the
most influential spiritual books of the twentieth century--including the
mega-best seller The Seven-Storey Mountain. He was something of a
rock star for a cloistered monk, and from his monastic cell he enjoyed a
wide and lively correspondence with people from the worlds of religion,
literature, and politics. During that period he also explored and wrote
extensively on Buddhism, Sufism, art, and social action. The man to
whom he owed obedience in the cloistered life was a much more
traditional Catholic, his abbot, Dom James Fox. To say that these two
men had a conflicted relationship would be an understatement, but the
tension their differences in orientation brought actually led to
creative results on both sides and to a kind of hard-won respect and
love. Roger Lipsey's portrait of this unusual relationship is compelling
and moving; it shows Merton in the years his imagination was taking him
far beyond the walls of the monastery, and eventually, literally to
Asia.