Word: mertonism
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...game was created by Merton Olds, a Du Pont marketing manager with a Ph.D. in chemistry, and his wife Linda, a high school biology teacher. Noting the popularity of Trivial Pursuit, the black couple decided to devise a more educational game. Said Merton: "We wanted to invent something that would build black self-esteem." Their creation has 780 cards containing three questions each. Sample query: Name the most populous African country. Answer: Nigeria. The title Rise 'n fly comes from a type of winning hand...
...When Merton entered the monastery 43 years ago, Roman Catholic religious orders were faithful to the rigorous disciplines of old. A little-known New York writer and teacher whose life had been rakish though not quite dissolute, he converted from irreligion to Catholicism at 23 and stunned friends three years later by joining the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly known as Trappists. The monks of Gethsemani lived on prayer, hard manual toil, vegetables and little else. Under the rule of silence, all conversation was forbidden...
...never write again!" his literary agent said. But seven years after disappearing behind Gethsemani's walls, Merton produced The Seven Storey Mountain. The autobiography of conversion sold 300,000 copies in less than a year (more than 3 million as of 1984). That book was followed by 60 other volumes of meditations, poems, essays, criticism, history, translations, drawings and photographs. For masses of readers Brother Louis, as he was called by the Trappists, redefined the image of monasticism and made the concept of saintliness accessible to moderns. His treatise on meditation, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), was deemed...
Though not the cult figure he was during the 1950s and '60s, Merton still commands a following. Forty of his books are in print. Paulist Press is offering a videotape in which Michael Moriarty portrays the monk. Last June PBS televised a biography, and the film is still enjoying brisk sales and rentals. The show's producers have now recycled 20 of their interviews as Merton by Those Who Knew Him Best (Harper & Row; 191 pages; $12.95), a slight but engaging book...
...major item in the current wave of interest is the finely wrought new biography by Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Houghton Mifflin; 690 pages; $24.95). A professor of creative writing at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, Mott, 54, succeeded the late John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me), the original biographer named by Merton's literary executors. The author provides some fresh details about the 30 years that Merton treated in Seven Storey Mountain, but the book's most fascinating contribution involves the second half of Merton's life. The executors gave Mott...