The extent to which the things that you think and do are based upon the expectations of others is directly proportional to the degree...

This does not mean that a mature person never consults anyone else. Contemplation is always contextual. It exists within the broad...

To choose a value that is questioned and doubted is to place oneself in the position of being doubted. - Thomas Merton, Contemplation In...

Here we prefer all that is quiet and unassuming. We have no taste for excitements. Inclined to emptiness with no great projects and no...

The problem of Berenger in Ionesco’s play ‘Rhinoceros’ is the problem of the human person stranded and alone in what threatens to become...

In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself,...

It was Christ who shed his light on the psalmist when he prayed: You are my joy. To achieve true joy you must practice contemplation in...

Without primitive simplicity there is no contemplation and no contemplative life. Contemplative living as a Christian calms the demand...

Where one person has voiced rationalizations about tradition and authority it is only natural that another person should respond with...

There is a natural consent and an ordinary response to this present and simple reality that is itself faith, without being unnecessarily...

By and large people who are religious are looking for solutions to problems. The causes for their anxieties are most often taught to...

There is an unwritten code in Western culture that prohibits aloneness. In doing so it imposes an onus that prevents personal...

There is a societal fear of loneliness in the West. Indeed, to assert a personal identity is not tolerated. Numerous features in...

Westerners suffer from an identity crisis. For the vast majority this crisis is both severe and prolonged, and most never manage to get...

The modern use of the English word cult refers to a group's unusual beliefs or shared interests. Older usage refers to religious devotion...

There's this incongruous persistence, this insistence in progress, propped up alongside of a simultaneous, ongoing existential pessimism....

Traditional religious thinking sees modernity as an error, with modernity’s (and postmodernity’s) error being the rejection of one’s...

There is nothing more predictable than people's behaviour. Humans have a limited range of psychologies and a limited number of ways to...

If people are anything more than consumers who exist in order to keep economies and their means of production going, then you would be...

...the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. ​ - Thomas Merton...