{"product_id":"merton-and-friends-9780826418692","title":"Merton and Friends","description":"\u003cp\u003eThomas Merton  Robert Lax  and Edward Rice were college buddies who became life-long friends  literary innovators  and spiritual iconoclasts. Their friendship and collaboration began at Columbia College in the 1930s and reached its climax in the widely acclaimed magazine  which ran from 1953 to 1967  a year before Mertons death.. Rice was founder  publisher  editor  and art director; Merton and Lax two of his steadiest collaborators. Well-known on campus for their high spirits  avant-garde appreciation of jazz and Joyce  and indiscrimate love of movies  they also shared their Catholic faith. Rice  a cradle Catholic  was godfather to both Merton and Lax.  Merton  who died some 30 years before the other two  was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual autobiography  The Seven-Story Mountain. Lax  whom Jack Kerouac dubbed \"one of the great original voices of our times \" eventually received recognition as one of \"Americas greatest experimental poets  a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words\" (New York Times Book Review).  He spent most of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded  Rice wrote 20 books on world culture  religion  and biography. His 1970 biography of Merton  The Man in the Sycamore Tree  was judged too intimate  forthright  and candid by those who  in Laxs words  \"were trying so hard to get pictures of Mertons halo that they missed his face.\" His biography of the 19th century explorer and \"orientalist\" Sir Richard Burton became a New York Times bestseller.    This book is not only the story of a 3-way friendship but a richly detailed depiction of the changes in American Catholic life over the past sixty-some years  a micro history of progressive Catholicism from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite their loyalty to the church  the three often disagreed with its positions  grumbled about its  tolerance for mediocrity in art  architecture  music  and intellectual life and its comfortableness with American materialism and military power. And each in his own way engaged in a spiritual search that extended beyond Christianity to the great religions of the East.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45648208396341,"sku":"ByrdShop_0826418694","price":47.45,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780826418692.jpg?v=1781712673","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/merton-and-friends-9780826418692","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}