Edit: Keeping with a central theme this week often touching upon questionable patheos blogs, we thought it would be instructive to post the following video which was posted by two other bloggers known here. This is via North Face via the Bones that Crush.
It's especially interesting in light of recent praise from Deacon's Bench and James Martin SJ (A frequent source of problematic and erroneous opinions), celebrating Thomas Merton, who was himself a card carrying Communist Party member, and who is substanially problematic for many other reasons as well, considering his interest in being a public intellectual which often clashed with his apparent religious vocation as a solitary and Trappist.
Some years back, I wrote a piece for Catholic Digest on “Thomas Merton’s New York.” The story was a pilgrimage, of sorts, visiting some of the landmarks of Merton’s life that are still standing in Manhattan.
In the short video below, Fr. James Martin takes us to two of those landmarks: the church were Merton was baptized and the rowhouse in Greenwich Village where he lived. At the end, Fr. Martin quips that he credits his vocation to four people: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and Thomas Merton.
The unfortunate demoralization of the West continues through such conflicted, inconsistent and frankly deceptive individuals. As one reader observes:
Merton's legacy lives on in the Thomas Merton Award which has been awarded since 1972 to such luminaries as Miguel D'Escoto, Howard Zinn, Ron Dellums, Angela Davis, Daniel Berrigan and Noam Chomsky.
