Nessun uomo è un'isola

Amazing. Breathetaking. I adore this book. I have never given a book a five because there is no such thing as perfection but this book is more or less perfect it is that close. For a million hundred different reasons that is hard for me to explain. But I shall try, yes it is a religious book so it i Leggi tutto

This might not even have been written by Merton. He was a huge marketing name, I wouldn’t be surprised if they (his monastery) ghost-wrote this and published it under his name. Too abstract, too airy, too many vague references to other things that are never actually mentioned. The Bible has more tha Leggi tutto

This book is short and power-packed. If you are a new taker, as I am, you will find yourself making slow progress not because Merton's epigrams are hard to understand but because you will want to squirrel them away for future use.

If we are lucky, once or twice in our lives a book will come along that will truly, drastically, change us. This was one such book. I first read it a little more than fifteen years ago and I felt that it was unquestionably one of the greatest books I had ever read. It humbled me. It challenged me. S Leggi tutto

A collection of probing reflections on personhood, spirituality, and the Christian life. Merton offers here perhaps the most insightful treatment on the essence of Christian spirituality that I have read.

A good read, but might be more frustrating than enlightening depending on where you're coming from. Merton does a great job of describing the spiritual plight of humanity (particularly the plight of humans who cultivate no sense of the spirit), but his prescriptive assertions are too narrow to be of Leggi tutto