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Matthew Fox is a lecturer and author of 30 books including Original Blessing; Creativity; One River, Many Wells; The A.W.E. Project; The Hidden Spirituality of Men; and his most recent The Pope’s War, and Christian Mystics.  Fox has focused on renewing the ancient tradition of Creation Spirituality.  This tradition is welcoming of arts and artists, wisdom centered, prophetic and committed to eco-justice, social justice, and gender justice. 

 

Christian Mystics just received an award as “one of the best spiritual books of 2011” from Library Journal.

 

Fox believes that by "reinventing work, education and worship we can bring about a non-violent revolution." Fox is currently working in a project for inner city teenagers called Y.E.L.L.A.W.E. (Youth and Elders Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education)  

 

 

 

Writing The Pope’s War (Sterling, May 2011) was so dour, so dark, so dreary, the news was so much the opposite of uplifting that I told a friend I felt like Oscar the Grouch who lived in the garbage can on Sesame Street. Yes, it was like living with garbage. What to do? I put the project, about 60% finished, on a shelf not sure I would ever return to it. All my other books had uplifted me in the writing; not that one. It dragged me down day after day.  It was not fun.

 

It was then that the idea of the Christian Mystics book  (New World Library, March 2011) came to my mind.  I had an invitation from DAILY OM, an on-line spirituality program that had not published much out of the Christian tradition to compose a course on line.  With the urging of Andrew Harvey I created a 365 day series of meditations and that morphed into the book itself.  Working on that project for six months rejuvenated my soul and refreshed me.  As more and more news reports emerged about the Vatican Shenanigans especially around Fr. Maciel and around cover-up of priestly pedophilia cases all over Europe, I found I had retrieved my energy to return to finish my book on the pope.

 

But there is a second connection between the two books as well.  The culmination of the pope book was my conviction that the Holy Spirit is so decimating Catholicism as we know it today that we can and need to push the restart button on Christianity.  This includes “taking the treasure from the burning building” as I put it in the book.  And first and foremost of those treasures is our mystical and prophetic heritage.  Thus Christian Mystics is a deep part of the treasure that our lineage contains.  It points the way to Christianity’s greatest accomplishments and its greatest future potential.  The task is not that complicated: It is about turning out mystics and prophets.  Like Jesus did; and was.

 

If you missed the LIVE show on January 11, 2012, you can access the archive here.