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BOOK REVIEWS123 Although sources are properly indicated in footnotes, there is no index or bibliography. Joan Bland, S.N.D. Education for Parish Service Programs Trinity College Washington, D.C. The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers. Selected and edited by Christine M. Bochen. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 1993- Pp. xiv, 314. $25.00.) In the event that readers have wondered what Thomas Merton did -with his time at his Kentucky monastery other than pray, chant, contemplate, teach, write scores of books and hundreds of articles, and make his Trappist censors occasionally nervous, the answer is now clear. He wrote letters—thousands of them—letters usually laced with insight and intensity—letters that could be by turns angry, somber, witty, or luminous. The Merton epistles have been appearing from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in recent years in handsome, well-edited editions under the general editorship of William H. Shannon. The latest entry, the fourtíi, The Courage for Truth, contains Merton's side of correspondence with fellow writers. Some of the better-known recipients of the famed monk's letters in this edition include Jacques Maritain, Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, Ernesto Cardenal, James Baldwin, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The excellent editing here for so diverse a collection is the work of Dr. Christine M. Bochen, professor of religious studies at Nazareth College of Rochester, who has served as secretary of the International Thomas Merton Society. For those who have followed the biographical studies on Merton from such scholars as Furlong, Mott, or Shannon, there will be little in these pages by way of surprise. Since the vast majority of these letters come from the 1960's, readers will in effect hear Merton thinking out loud as his mind struggles with die immensity of rapid changes in both Catholicism and modern society. He puzzles primarily, it seems to me, over the nature of belonging in the contemporary era: What it means to belong to church and monastic tradition; to the vocation of poet and essayist; what it means to belong to the American nation in the midst of its turmoil over racism at home and the war in Vietnam. There are certainly times in diese pages when Merton's tone turns dismal and even apocalyptic. He sounds on a few occasions like a man at his wit's end. "This is an age of deep spiritual winter," he writes publisher Helen Wolff in 1959. "We have ice to walk on instead of water." 124BOOK REVIEWS But this is Merton, after all, and the power of his utter and ultimate faith perdures. His letters to Milosz alone are worth the careful study ofthese pages. Merton writes lines to the Polish intellectual in 1959 that could stand as a major thematic of this sometimes searing volume: Milosz, life is on our side. ... To be a sinner, to want to be pure, to remain in patient expectation of the divine mercy, and above all to forgive and love others, as best we can, that is what makes us Christians___ Behind it all is the secret that love has an infinite power, and its power, once released can in an instant destroy and swallow up all hatred, all evil, all injustice. . . . That is the meaning of Calvary. (Pp. 57 ff) Clyde F. Crews Bellarmine College Louisville Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950—1985. By Patrick Allitt. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1993. Pp. xv, 315. $29.95.) This is an exploration of the role of Catholic intellectuals in United States conservative circles over the past forty years. It is a litany of names that have come and gone, predominantly lay and almost exclusively male. Many ofthose featured were converts to Roman Cadiolicism. A surprising number had no deep roots in Catholicism as it had developed in the United States. They were European émigrés or people whose formative years were in other religious traditions. The study begins with the now-familiar depiction of the "Cadiolic ghetto," defensive and preoccupied widi anticommunism. With a preliminary nod to early converts like Ross J.S. Hoffman widi his Burkean revival and Francis Graham Wilson, Allitt spends a good deal oftime on...

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