In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social criticism. For nearly 27 years he was a monk of the austere Trappist order, where he became an eloquent spiritual writer and mystic as well as an anti-war advocate and witness to peace. Merton: A Film Biography provides the first comprehensive look at this remarkable 20th century religious philosopher who wrote, in addition to his immensely popular autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, over 60 books on some of the most pressing social issues of our time, some of which are excerpted here. Merton offers an engaging profile of a man whose presence in the world touched millions of people and whose words and thoughts continue to have a profound impact and relevance today.
The Cistercian monks of Austria are holy men who rise at 4:30 a.m., pray for more than four hours a ...
An intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in th...
How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often se...
An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes viol...
Nicholas Vreeland walked away from a worldly life of privilege to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Gr...
The Athos peninsula in Greece is one of Europe's last secrets. Over 2000 monks live on Athos - cut o...
Ralph Ellison was an African-American writer and essayist, who's only novel Invisible Man (1953) gai...
Half blind and half deaf, ostraziced Cuban writer Rafael Alcides tries to finish his unpublished nov...
Bill Drummond, once the most notorious man in pop music, now travels around the world baking cakes, ...
Portrait of Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a writer and filmmaker who survived the Holocaust.
Commentator-comic Bill Maher plays devil's advocate with religion as he talks to believers about the...
A portrait of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, which includes historical footage of China's repres...
In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed ceramics workers walk into their idle factory, roll out ...
Dick Proenneke retired at age 50 in 1967 and decided to build his own cabin in the wilderness at the...
Narrated by Linda Hunt, this documentary examines the life of the late author and gay rights activis...
Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1698-1760), known as the Ba'al Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name"), is on...
A portrait of the brilliant American writer Truman Capote (1924-84) and the New York high society of...
In celebration of his ninetieth birthday, Sir David Attenborough shares extraordinary highlights of ...
Wheel of Time is Werner Herzog's photographed look at the largest Buddhist ritual in Bodh Gaya, Indi...
A deeply intimate and highly cinematic documentary featuring the Dalai Lama, who, at nearly ninety y...