Meatyard / Merton : Merton / Meatyard photographing Thomas Merton / Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard; Calligraphies by Thomas Merton; foreword and selected excerpts by Stephen Reily.
Material type:
TextPublication details: Louisville, KY : Fons Vitae, [2013]Description: 29 plates : illustrations ; 22 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781887752503
- 1887752501
- 770.92 MEA 23
- TR654 .M376 2013
| Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Loan | LSAD Library Main Collection | 770.92 MEA (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 39002100632851 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
Thirty-eight photographs by Ralph Meatyard, an important if often-overlooked American photographer, provide an intimate look at the private life of one of the most renowned and influential spiritual thinkers of the 20th century in the last two years before his death. Excerpts from Thomas Merton's own journals serve as captions to the images, offering a profound emotional context.
Also included are eight previously unreleased pieces of Merton's own stunning calligraphic art, as well as essays by Roger Lipsey, an expert on Merton's art; Chris Meatyard, the photographer's son; and Stephen Reily, who discusses the close relationship between the photographer and the spiritual teacher.
Catalog from an exhibition of photographs held at the Louisville Visual Art Association Gallery at Whiskey Row Lofts, Louisville, Kentucky, May 13th - 22nd 2013.
Author notes provided by Syndetics
Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism.After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death.
His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression.
Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.
(Bowker Author Biography)