Maverick Philosopher

Robert Giroux

Catholic bookman and editor of Merton, Kerouac, Flannery O' Connor, and Walker Percy, to name just four.

Lifestyle Rightism

Sohrab Ahmari is against it. Clean living and self-improvement are no substitute for political action. One form of Lifestyle Rightism is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option which Ahmari dubs "the New Frontierism" and criticizes for its ahistori...

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Substack latest. Excerpt: One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of mo...

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Merton, Baez, Dylan, and Ry Cooder

Thomas Merton, though 51 years old in 1966, was wide open to the '60s Zeitgeist -- all of it. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six, p. 93, entry of 10 July 1966: Borrowed a record player and played Joan Baez over again -- and ...

And Then Along Came the 'Sixties

I can easily seeHow Merton lost his wayBy exposing himselfTo events of the day.

Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. ...

Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monaster...

On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Or is death just a natural event like any other? Merton the monk triggers a Maverick meditatio mori.