Thomas Merton
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This Friday, The Architecture of Authenticity Launches
One idea runs underneath almost everything I have written in this book: We receive before we achieve. None of us creates ourselves from nothing. We inherit languages we did not invent, stories we did not begin, communities we did not build, and gifts we did not earn. Even our capacity to become ourselves depends, in… Continue reading
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Truthful Belonging: How Can a Life Become Our Own?
Sometimes belonging provided the conditions in which a life could flourish. Sometimes it narrowed what could be spoken or pursued. Sometimes individual aspiration opened a life; sometimes it damaged relationships whose value became visible only after they were strained. Continue reading
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Known Enough to Become Yourself
The self that comes back is never simply the self that left. Continue reading
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Authenticity isn’t Legibility
Many performances of authenticity are protective. They arise not from vanity, but from fear. People learn to reveal enough to appear honest, but not enough to risk being known. Performed vulnerability then becomes a shelter. It looks like openness while preserving control over exposure. Continue reading
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Consumerism, or Consumption, of Self
I still think about an encounter I once had with Rosie, a young woman who appeared at my door in the middle of the night. What stayed with me was not merely the strangeness of the situation, but the unmediated quality of it. There was no audience, no profile, no performance, no curated identity. There… Continue reading
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Fragmented Identity
Looking back, I realize continuity rarely survived through dramatic moments of self-discovery. More often, it persisted through ordinary practices repeated quietly across time. Continue reading
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The Immediate Life and the Formation of Authenticity
A child is suffering. A relationship fractures. A conversation suddenly turns tense. Fear, anger, exhaustion, embarrassment, or grief emerges before thought has time to organize itself. We speak quickly. We defend ourselves instinctively. We search for relief before we search for meaning. Continue reading
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Doubt Beyond Certainty
My hunch that our religious instinct is best realized when we are exploring, and when we occupy places that permit exploration. Continue reading
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The Gift of Knowledge: Absorbed by Truth
Why do I say ex-philosopher? Because, since Descartes and perhaps before, modern Western thought has turned knowledge into a problem to be solved. Rationalism, empiricism, idealism, phenomenology, utilitarianism: all these systems tend to make knowledge into a mechanism of control, a means of prediction, a form of power. Descartes and Locke both used the word… Continue reading
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A Review of David Beck’s Fragments: Reflections on Life and Faith throughout the Years
If you are going through a midlife change, or reflect on life at all, you have to read this book. Book reviews are supposed to be brief, but exercising restraint in reviewing David Beck’s “Fragments: Reflections on Life and Faith through the Years” ($15 softcover, $9.99 Kindle US, on Amazon.com), would be inauthentic. Moreover, it… Continue reading