From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, Merton Thomas, Cardenal Ernesto

From the Monastery to the World collects the correspondence between two of the best-known poet-priests of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal. The letters of Father Cardenal are translated into English here for the first time.

The young Nicaraguan poet Cardenal first came under the tutelage of Merton as a novice at a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky in 1957. The letters they wrote to each other between 1959 and Mertons death in 1968 give readers a fascinating glimpse into the spiritual and political struggles of Merton--then the most famous writer about spiritual matters in the English-speaking world--and Cardenal, the seminarian and priest who had left monastic silence to build a utopian community in his native land and later became a revolutionary and Minister of Culture for Nicaraguas Sandinista government.