Word: merton
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Ever since the publication four years ago of his bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Trappist Thomas Merton (Father Louis) has been testifying to the virtues of the strict monastic life.* At least one of his fellow monks thinks that Merton makes too broad a case. Dom Aelred Graham, 46, a British theologian and an author himself (his latest book: Catholicism and the World Today), is now prior of St. Gregory's Priory in Portsmouth, R.I. He belongs to the Benedictines, an order older than the Trappists and far less stern in its practices. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly...
...wide literary spectrum. Among them: Novelists Evelyn Waugh, D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Kathleen Norris, Journalists Vincent Sheean, Rebecca West and Whittaker Chambers, Sportswriter Paul Gallico, Poet Alfred Noyes and Moviemaker John Farrow. The majority are Roman Catholics, and all but two-Trappist Thomas (The Seven Storey Mountain) Merton and Sister Madeleva, president of Indiana's St. Mary's College-are laymen...
...Most famed resident (and most garrulous-in print): Thomas Merton (author of Seven Storey Mountain...
Perhaps the trouble is editorial caution. Though its emphasis is supposed to be on new talent, New World Writing sticks to such well-established figures as Tennessee Williams, Thomas Merton and Christopher Isherwood. Moreover, the idea seems to have been to pick the most sedate examples of advance-guard writing that could be found. The result is that, while highbrow esoterica is avoided, so is highbrow boldness. Only one piece is downright bad: Tennessee Williams' tasteless closet drama about D. H. Lawrence. The rest read comfortably enough, but seldom sparkle...
With these slim clues to go on, Price recalled a fragment of knowledge picked up from his studies. There was a famous man in 1391 who wrote about astronomy. The same man had a friend at Merton whom he called "The Philosophical Strode." Could it be that the author of MS. 75-a "lewde compilator of the labour of old astrologiens"-was Geoffrey Chaucer himself...