Nurturing Contemplation

Author of sixteen Pendle Hill pamphlets, including this one, Carol Murphy continues to explore the roles of reason, revelation and mystical experience in the mature religious faith. She invites readers to consider the wellspring of action in the contemplative life. In her words, “This essay embodies further thoughts along the line of my previous pamphlets, Holy Morality and The Available Mind, stimulated by reading Monica Furlong's biography of Thomas Merton, and by the remark of an Australian philosopher that he has seen faces shining with holiness among both Trappists and Friends and that the latter have a great opportunity to develop the contemplative life in the world. As usually happens, other books serendipitously came my way to furnish a cloud of witnesses whom I have invited to speak for themselves.”