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Dutch Catholic priest and writer Henri Joseph Machiel Nouwen felt God's call upon his life at a very early age and was ordained as a diocesan priest in 1957. After studying psychology at the University of Nijmegen in his native country of Holland and at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, he taught at the University of Notre Dame and in the Divinity Schools of Yale and Harvard. Twice during the 1970s he lived and worked alongside the Trappist monks at the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York, and in the early 1980s he spent time living among the poor of Peru. A year after being called to join L'Arche in Trosly, France, the first of over one hundred communities founded by Jean Vanier where assistants live among people with developmental disabilities, he left Harvard in order to serve as pastor and assistant at the L'Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto, Canada. Keywords: Nouwen, Henri (1932–1996); dutch catholic priest; Nouwen's life of the beloved; belovedness, four comprehensive “movements”; spiritual disciplines, community, ministry, compassion

Thomas Merton was born of a New Zealand father and an American mother in the Midi region (Prades) of France. Merton was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1938, while he was a student at Columbia. Three years later he became a Trappist monk at the abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), became an international success not only because of its significant statement about monastic spirituality but also because of its telling account of the spiritual condition of the times. Keywords: Merton, Thomas (1915–1968); the seven storey mountain; trappist monk, in kentucky; contemporary American spirituality

In the period 1963–1974, 82 monks and 48 nuns from five Dutch and Belgian Trappist monasteries each participated in two or more out of nine different trials designed to test the effect of 58 different fat-modified diets on serum cholesterol. We analysed these data to quantify the extentto which healthy, normolipaemic subjects differ in the responsiveness of their serum cholesterol to a change in dietary fatty acid composition. Statistically significant between-person variance components (SD2ρp) were found in the serum cholesterol responses for the whole group (SD2ρp= [0·20 mmol l-1]2), for the men (SD2ρp= [0·24 mmol l-1]2) and for those women who participated in three or more trials (SD2ρp= [0·14 mmol l-1]2). The between-person variation (expressed as SD) was on average only half as large as the within-person variation in response when the same subject was challenged repeatedly. It is concluded that medically significant differences in responsiveness to fat-modified diets exist in both men and women. However, few subjects fail entirely to respond to a change in dietary fatty acid composition. In addition, the large within-subject variability makes it difficult to identify hypo- and hyperresponders.