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A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
Tag: thomas merton
A Buddhist Valentine
By S. Brent Plate
Love is not a shepherd’s crook.
I am not the great shepherd
Reaching out to pull you in.
You cannot be my valentine.
I cannot possess love
We can only be possessed by it.
**
Valentine’s Day approaches and I am sitting in a room in a Buddhist monastery in the Hudson River Valley of New York. I’ve come to jump start my dying contemplative life, revive a withering body in order to reproduce a spirit, physically giving birth to a soul. I feel a long way from red and pink hearts and sticky sweet treats. Not above it, just removed, somewhere off to the side. Like I’m off the holiday commercial grid. Continue Reading →
Much Love to You Always, Dorothy
All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day; Marquette University Press (2011), $35
Reviewed by Jack Downey
The acclaimed Catholic University of America professor, John Tracy Ellis, once said that you can’t be a good historian unless you enjoy reading dead people’s mail. Happily for anyone who considers herself a Dorothy Day aficionado but has neither the resources nor the particular inclination to hoof it out to Milwaukee to visit the glorious Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Archives at Marquette University, the universe has given us the Orbis Books editor-in-chief and Day historian extraordinaire, Robert Ellsberg. His new anthology of Dorothy’s letters, All the Way to Heaven, joins its brick-sized companion volume of her journals – The Duty of Delight – to give anyone with a public library card or an few extra bucks in his pocket a glimpse into the intimate thoughts and correspondence of this icon of progressive American Catholic activism. That said, if you’re looking for an excuse to visit the birthplace of affordable hipster-friendly light beer, then a trip to the archives might be just what the doctor ordered.
David O’Brien, the eminent American Catholic historian and professor emeritus at Holy Cross, has called Dorothy Day “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” Continue Reading →