Word: mertonism
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...themes (in that order) figure in Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 555 pages), an ingeniously woven literary tapestry that tells the stories of four great American Catholic writers of the 20th century--Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Dorothy...
...Thomas Merton, who accomplished the only-in-America oxymoronic feat of becoming a celebrity Trappist monk (his memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a best seller in 1948), fathered a child out of wedlock before taking his vows; later, as a middle-aged hermit with a taste for bourbon, he had a brief love affair with a nurse. Walker Percy drank too much. Poor Flannery O'Connor, crippled by lupus, dead at 39, sometimes sounded alarmingly like a racial bigot...
DIED. ROBERT MERTON, 92, erudite sociologist and onetime aspiring magician whose knowledge of everything from Kant to baseball made his work, notably the 1969 book On the Shoulders of Giants, widely influential; in New York City. Coiner of the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" and inventor of the focus group (whose abuse he later deplored), he propounded a theory of social deviance popular among liberal politicians in the 1960s, which held that such behavior results when society promotes the same goals to everyone without giving all access to achieve them...
...Merton R. Bernfield, pediatrician, cell biologist and former chief of the division of newborn medicine at Children’s Hospital, died March 18 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease...
...Robert C. Merton, an expert in finance and Baker professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, wins the Nobel Prize for Economics...