In the world of religion, some things stay the same, while many are constantly adapting to meet our new world of the internet and cell phones, scientific discovery, increasing awareness of gender and race dynamics, multiculturalism, the numbers of people identifying their religion as “none” or “spiritual but not religious,” and so much more. We [...]

Thomas Merton's Influence on the Beats by Robert Inchausti, author of Hard to Be a Saint in the City Thomas Merton, “Honorary Beatnik” It’s hard to say exactly when Thomas Merton became an “Honorary Beatnik.” One could chase the association all the way back to the mid-thirties when, as an undergraduate at Columbia, he first became friends [...]

We have excerpted part of the chapter “Meditation Looks Inward, Poetry Holds Forth: Is There a Beat Way of Writing?” from Hard to Be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats here. In this book, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at its heart a spiritual one. [...]