“We could ask for no better mentor and guide than Thomas Merton.”

The book Passion for Peace is an abridgement of Passion for Peace: The Social Essays by Thomas Merton, originally published in 1995. Most of the essays were written by Merton in the early 1960s. It was in those years that Merton realized the contemplative life of a Christian monk is not meant to center on an individual‘s spiritual state, but, instead, is meant to be focused on the larger, contemporary concerns of the world. Merton writes on people as diverse as Adolf Eichmann, Mohandas Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh and places as far-flung as Auschwitz and Vietnam. We hear the more mature voice of Merton, who had by this time rejected the religious romanticism of his younger years, but his eloquence and faith remain undiminished.