Słowa, wojna i milczenie. Thomas Merton na XXI wiek
Words, War and Silence: Thomas Merton for the Twenty-First Century
Author(s): Rowan WilliamsContributor(s): Tomasz Markiewka (Translator)
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Christian Theology and Religion, Philosophy, Language and Literature Studies, Applied Linguistics, Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Theology and Religion
Published by: Akademia Techniczno-Humanistyczna w Bielsku-Białej
Keywords: Thomas Merton;language;reason and rationality;
Summary/Abstract: Throughout his writing life Thomas Merton was preoccupied with the dangers of language. He was attentive to what was being done to language in the climate of militarism, rivalry, and international anxiety. On the one hand, there was the incoherence of language that could not be trusted, on the other – the coherence of weapons that were infallible. In this environment the whole notion of reason and sanity was shaken. When we treat ourselves, and ourselves alone, as reasonable, we say of the other that there is no meaning there. This article examines Merton’s thinking about the crisis of language and suggests vital connections between the world in the 1960s and the world today: a world of self-reflexive culture, of polarized politics, of reductive, banal and trivial accounts of human nature, a thinning and a shrinking of language and what it can say and do, and a one-sided view of reason.
Journal: Świat i słowo
- Issue Year: 2/2018
- Issue No: 31
- Page Range: 215-235
- Page Count: 21
- Language: Polish