Word: trappist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the severed heads of seven French Trappist monks were found in a remote mountainous region of Algeria in May 1996, it was natural to assume the murders were the latest gruesome act by jihadists in their long-running and bloody campaign against the Algerian government. Thirteen years on, however, the victims' families, church officials and the French and Algerian publics have been shocked by the revelation that the monks may have been killed as the result of a bungled Algerian military operation. According to testimony given by retired French general François Buchwalter as part of an official...
...vulgar bibulous customs of your college peers. Turn down the boom box and raise the lights. Sip, do not chug. And let the drink in your hand nurse, not eliminate the need for, conversation and charm. Soon, form will follow function. Trade your mass-produced American lager for a Trappist brew, crafted lovingly in a monastery according to a recipe perfected over the centuries. Instead of insipid vodka, open a bottle of aromatic and complex gin—a challenge, indeed, but a meet reward for those with patience and perseverance. And, finally, put down the shot glass?...
...therapeutic exercise that will purge, Treb says, "all your aggressions from 2006." (He knows us so well.) We are to remove wristwatches, bracelets, rings, necklaces and other gewgaws that might slip off during our pitching exertions. Treb also expects us to apply ourselves with the ascetic, aesthetic devotion of Trappist monks: "We do not do drugs nor alcohol, we do confetti...
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...