Matthew Fox delivers A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity. The founder of Wisdom University in Oakland and creator of the wildly popular Cosmic Masses held in the Bay Area and across the country, Fox was for 34 years an ordained priest. Never shy of controversy, he hit the headlines when he was silenced, then expelled from the Dominican Order by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) for founding the Creation Spirituality movement.
In A New Reformation, Fox calls for a reawakening of the true Christian spirit and the repudiation of the authoritarian, punitive tendencies that prevail in modern churches, likening today's intolerant "father" ideologies to the religious environment that existed 500 years ago when Martin Luther launched a break from the Roman Catholic Church. As Luther did in his Reformation, Fox calls for new forms in worship, proactive solutions to the ennui of mainline Christianity, which he calls a "sleeping giant" eager to be awakened to the true teachings of Jesus about justice and compassion.
Bio
Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox is author of 28 books including “Original Blessing,†“The Reinvention of Work,†“Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet,†“One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths,†“A Spirituality Named Compassion†and his most recent “A New Reformation!.†He was a member of the Dominican Order for 34 years. He holds a doctorate (received summa cum laude) in the History and Theology of Spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris. Seeking to establish a pedagogy that was friendly to learning spirituality, he established an Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality that operated for seven years at Mundelein College in Chicago and twelve years at Holy Names College in Oakland. For ten of those years at Holy Names College Cardinal Ratzinger, as chief Inquisitor and head of the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith (called the Office of the Holy Inquisition until 1965), tried to shut the program down. Ratzinger silenced Fox for one year in 1988 and forced him to step down as director. Three years later he expelled Fox from the Order and then had the program terminated at Holy Names College. Rather than disband his amazing and ecumenical faculty, Fox started his own University called University of Creation Spirituality nine years ago in Oakland, California. Its name has now changed to Wisdom University and Fox is president emeritus and a teaching professor there.
The reason the media was so bad on Iraq had nothing to do with any "communication revolution". Instead we must look elsewhere. One thing I noticed is that the media seemed to act as an outlet for the administration, simply repeating government propaganda completely uncritically. Other places to look include media ownership and the entire advertising based model of media funding, which has lead to systematically bad outcomes for the public. Media then becomes subject to the profit motive. Their customers are advertisers and their product are audiences, how could they then be expected to provide proper coverage for the public? I recommend Chomsky's and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media which explains these issues in great detail and much better than I ever could.
It's interesting to hear from a religious personality actually calling for more schism within the church; I was surprised to hear Fox's answer to conflicts among Lutherans was to encourage, rather than oppose, a break-up between Lutheranism's liberal and traditionalist sects. But is jumping ship from your parent organization really the best way to advance your ideals? Wouldn't a lack of opposition just encourage both groups to become more entrenched in their particular ideologies? That doesn't seem like it would always necessarily be a good thing.
A defrocked Dominican priest, Matthew Fox calls for a new reformation within the Christian church, likening himself to Martin Luther. Among other issues, he discusses the church's inadequate response to the paedophile crisis.