Matthew Fox is a spiritual theologian and founder and president of the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California. For the past 30 years he has worked to recover Christianity's lost and mistranslated mystical teachings. In 1995, Matthew Fox was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award. He is the author of 23 books including Original Blessing, which has sold over a quarter million copies. In this six CD, seven and one-quarter hour Audio Learning Course, Fox examines the transformative power of what he calls "radical prayer." Using the rubric of creation-centered cosmology, he covers six themes: pray always, recovering the sacred masculine, recovering the sacred feminine, confronting evil, reinventing how we work and learn, and deep ecumenism.
St. Paul advises Christians to "pray always," and Fox takes that to mean much more than verbal petitions and praise of God. It really encompasses "the utterance of your heart" through all that you do, say, or think. Prayer is a radical response to life that has been modeled by Jesus, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Rabbi Heschel, and many others.
Early on, Fox points out that the power of prayer is an active force in the pursuit of justice. He goes so far as to suggest that sustainability is the word for justice in our time. We are at a point in history when our species is destroying the natural world and not taking the necessary steps to reverse this self-destructive process. Instead of striving to create a world that works for all, we are erecting walls that separate individuals and groups from each other through nationalism, homophobia, patriarchal structures, and anthropocentricism.
One of the most poignant sessions deals with evil, which Fox sees not as the opposite of good but as the opposite of sacred. This means that you cannot call your enemies evil and then try to stamp them out. Rather the spiritual challenge is to reunite them with the good. Evil has many faces, and it always helps to look inwardly for this force in our own lives rather than projecting it upon others. Fox discusses the seven capital sins as examples of "misdirected love." He also has some tart observations on consumerism, the loss of conscience, and the power of envy.
Fox is a skilled spiritual teacher who is able to move confidently through very difficult contemporary problems and shed light as he goes. Whether talking about prophets and mystics, sick patriarchy and the lost feminine, inner work and the new cosmology, or imagination and myth-making; he creates many aha! moments for serious listeners who want to deepen and enrich their prayer life and bring love into action in daily life.
