Merton, Thomas in The Books Store

The correspondence is supplemented by a selection of Merton's photographs of the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, newly identified with captions supplied by Pleasant Hill Curator Larrie S. Currie. A review of the Andrews' Shaker Furniture by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy concludes the volume. Merton once observed, "The particular grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it." To read these letters is to experience a meeting of angels, coming to rest for a moment in the contemplation of the simple, but to this day challenging, gifts of the Shakers.

The Courage for Truth includes 20 years of Merton's correspondence with fellow writers, among them Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, and even Henry Miller. Over time Merton's order gave him increasing intellectual and political leeway--though never quite enough. In one letter, he assures Milosz: "You can say nothing about the Church that can shock me. If I stay with the Church it is out of a disillusioned love, and with a realization that I myself could not be happy outside, though I have no guarantee of being happy inside either. In effect, my 'happiness' does not depend on any institution or establishment. As for you, you are part of my 'Church' of friends who are in many ways more important to me than the institution."