Thomas Merton was Roman Catholic and a member of one of Catholicism's strictest monastic orders. Nonetheless, throughout his religious life one sees the remarkable influence of Christian traditions best preserved within the Eastern Orthodox Church: iconography, the Jesus Prayer, and the apophatic spiritual path linked with Mt. Athos and Sinai. He treasured the sayings and stories of the Desert Fathers and was familiar with the Philokalia.

Merton and Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart collects all of Merton's writing on topics in Eastern Christianity. He studied and published on the writings that emanated from the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions, both in the early centuries of the Church and during revival of the monastic traditions of Orthodoxy on Mount Athos during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

His writing on Hesychasm, the practices surrounding the "Prayer of Jesus" that have as their aim preparing the spiritual seeker for union with the Godhead, are of particular contemporary importance. Western seekers have looked to Buddhism and the East for a thoroughly psychological and spiritual method of meditation. But, in fact, a Christian tradition, just as analytic and developed and more culturally palatable to the West, exists and is readily available.

Merton's commentary is accompanied by major new essays by scholars in the fields of Eastern Christianity and Merton studies: Bishop Kallistos Ware, Father Donald Allchin of England, and James Forest of the U.S. and Holland, among others. Both Allchin and Forest knew Merton personally and bring salient details of his interest in the Christian East together with a view of the man and his writing.

Merton and Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart is the second in a multi-volume series that exposes Thomas Merton's dialogues with traditions other than his own. The first volume, Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story, has met with critical success and found a wide audience among those interested in Merton, arguably one of the twentieth-century's top writers in the field of religion and spirituality.