{"id":4829,"date":"2018-01-26T05:29:14","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T05:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/01\/26\/merton-the-conflicted\/"},"modified":"2018-01-26T05:29:14","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T05:29:14","slug":"merton-the-conflicted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/01\/26\/merton-the-conflicted\/","title":{"rendered":"Merton the Conflicted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">Thomas Merton&#39;s sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular &#8212; to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, <em>pace<\/em> the thesis of David D. Cooper&#39;s excellent but mistaken <em>Thomas Merton&#39;s Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist<\/em> (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008). <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 11pt;\">Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted, so much so that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/books\/thomas-merton-the-hermit-who-never-was-his-young-lover-and-mysterious-death-1.2422818\">some <\/a>view his death by electrocution in Bangkok in December 1968 as a case of suicide. There is some plausibility to that conjecture, but I don&#39;t share the view.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Merton&#39;s sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular &#8212; to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper&#39;s excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton&#39;s Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/01\/26\/merton-the-conflicted\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Merton the Conflicted&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,349],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-merton-thomas","category-suicide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}