Thomas Merton
THOMAS MERTON UNCENSORED
BY
REV. PATRICK W. COLLINS, PH.D.
From the Author's Preface:
"The published writings of Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, were always censored from two sources. First by Merton himself. He did not write all he knew. And he sometimes deleted what he had written in early drafts. He selected carefully what he considered appropriate for publication. Secondly Thomas Merton was extensively censored by the Trappist Order. Merton's superiors frequently judged that things Merton chose to write should not be made available in print. This was not infrequently a source of great frustration to the author."
"A fuller view - and uncensored view - of the life and thoughts of Thomas Merton can be found by plumbing his correspondence with family, friends and colleagues over the years. Five volumes of his personal and professional correspondence have been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I have sought to extract from these sources many of the significant subjects about which Merton wrote. I have organized these topics chronologically. In this way readers can note the development of Merton's thoughts, feelings, intuitions and impressions over the years on a variety of topics of concern to him."
The chapters are presented in pdf format at the bottom of this page.
CONTENTS
Editor's comment:
We are offering this manuscript in a partially uncorrected version, with all citations, including long citations, in quotation marks (rather than as block quotes) and book titles or foreign words not italicized. It seems more important to offer broad access to Merton's ideas than to worry about abiding by the rules of style manuals. As time permits, corrections will be made. Alternate versions of these articles were published in 2009 in the Australian online journal Catholica, edited by Brian Coyne. pwc