Over the past couple weeks I’ve been slowly working my way through Thomas Merton’s Cold War Letters. The anthology is a collection of 111 pieces of personal correspondence written between October 1962 and October 1963, the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In the period just before he wrote the letters, Merton came under fire from the Archdiocese for his increasingly vocal opposition to nuclear war, an opposition the Catholic Church was slow to adopt. As a result, Merton circulated the collection of letters privately with a disclaimer on the first page: “Not for publication.” The letters weren’t made public until 25 years after his untimely death in 1968. Continue Reading…
