More on: Thomas Merton

I’d just had a brush with the opioid epidemic—the Bible belt removed and fastened around the arm to isolate a vein.

IN HIS his masterful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (reviewed in this issue), Paul Elie has crafted a braided narrative about the lives and works of four twentieth-century American Catholic writers, all of whom have become canonical figures: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. The first sentence of…

Madeline DeFrees is the author of two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Washington Book Award, as well as two books of nonfiction about convent life. She spent many years as a nun…

pace Thomas Merton When you pray, let your tongue taste the words it forms, and let your mind watch the meanings forming. This will paralyze your prayers, but it will stop your meaningless recitations. Next, as you pray to God, think about his omniscience, his power, his goodness and the problem of theodicy. This too…

I’D BEEN MEANING to call him for days and hadn’t, but that afternoon something made me search for a phone. The same something, maybe, that had led me to Robert Lax in the first place fifteen years before. My wife and I were walking through a small Turkish town where all I could find was a…