One of the most controversial and influential priests of our day -- bestselling author of Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, and The Reinvention of Work -- reflects on a lifetime of passionate faith. Matthew Fox's radical theology comes alive in this highly charged autobiography, which traces his spiritual evolution from altar boy in Madison, Wisconsin, to graduate student in revolution-rocked late-sixties Paris, to Dominican priest, to his high-profile battles with the Vatican. Best known for recovering the Creation Spirituality tradition, which brings together ecology, cosmology, justice, and mysticism in a theology based on "original blessing," Fox continues to be one of the most original thinkers in the church today. Finally, Fox addresses his new role as a "post-denominational priest" and a leader for urban young people.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Matthew Fox, the excommunicated Catholic priest who is perhaps the foremost articulator of creation spirituality, offers a meditative, almost conversational autobiography. It's the story of a vital and iconoclastic man who still loves his former church and who desperately wanted, while he was still part of it, to revitalize it in order to better address the spiritual challenges of postmodernity. Fox feels strongly that both the planet and the Church stand at an epochal crossroads, that one culture is dying as another struggles to be born. As he describes his growing differences with Rome, he writes movingly of the community of like-minded or receptive people that surrounded and sustained him, exhibiting the best Christian tradition of discipleship and critical inquiry. Despite their efforts and his own struggle to maintain both his integrity of thought and his vows of obedience to his Dominican order, Fox was first silenced and then expelled. He has, since 1994, found an ecclesial home as an Episcopal priest. This highly charged autobiography of a priestly life will stand as a lasting memorial to the difficulty of maintaining certain articles of faith and dogma at a time of shifting cultural paradigms. Fox's portrait of himself as he realizes that the truth he is pursuing is incompatible with the truth that his church can allow him to believe is likely to become a classic.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Under pressure from the Vatican, the Dominican order expelled Fox, the director of the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, in 1993 after years of escalating conflict. His theology, grounded in the ecstatic mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart, includes a heady mix of Mariology-based goddess worship, cosmology, Native American vision quests and sweat lodges, Celtic myths, and multimedia rave masses. In this spiritual autobiography, Fox traces his unique journey from a traditional Midwestern boyhood to pariah of institutional Catholicism. He shakes the dust from his feet, to use Jesus' phrase, as a new Episcopal priest. This provocative work will surely add to an unbroken string of controversy surrounding Fox and his beliefs. For subject collections.?Richard S. Watts, San Bernardino Cty. Lib., Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking but far too self-involved.,
This review is from: Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest (Paperback)
Much of what Matt Fox has to offer is contained in the first and last chapters. His thought and theology and philosophy are peppered throughtout the entire book and it is not hard to read. But the seemingly endless accounts of adulation get quite heavy. I find the title perhaps a bit off the mark. He has a great deal to offer in his personal story, the soaring heights and the times of disappointment and even despair. It would be more enlightening to read what HE felt and thought, and less of what his admirers said and wrote about him.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Post-denominational Priest,
By Steven Herrmann (California, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest (Paperback)
By Steven B. Herrmann 4/4/10 Author of "William Everson: The Shaman's Call." I was asked by Anglican Episcopal Priest, Matthew Fox, to write a review of his book which I am happy to do. Fox speaks of his "story about the coming of age spirituality in the latter half of the twentieth century" (2) in the form of a "cultural autobiography" (3). In reading this book, one gets a sense that Fox is contextualizing his life-story in the "larger story of our coming of age" (3). In a Journal entry from Fox's approach to his fifty-third year, he writes about his decision to become an Anglican priest in vocational terms; by narrowing the vocation-question down to how he might serve the younger generation, and young one's to come, given his remaining "powers" (6), Fox says his becoming an Episcopalian was his answer to a call to assist young people to "reinvent forms of religion/spirituality" and "help creation spirituality come alive again" (12). By creation spirituality he means amongst other things, the fourfold path he discovered in his reading of our biblical tradition and the Christian mystics: 1) Via Positiva, delight, awe, wonder, revelry, 2) Via Negativa, darkness, silence, suffering, letting go, 3) Via Creativa, birthing, creativity, and 4) Via Transformativia, compassion, justice, healing, celebration (283). The early chapters of the book tell his story of coming of age. But the story heats up after the writing of his book Original Blessing. He says had a dream of a dancing, musical, mystical bear, and he later learned that worship of the bear is one of the oldest forms of worship in North America; the bear is said by indigenous peoples to have redemptive and healing powers. In reflecting on this dream, Fox thought: "What a perfect Christ-image for North American spirituality!" (93). The source of the controversy that eventually led to his bear-fight with the Vatican began with a talk he gave to "Dignity," an organization of gay and lesbian lay Catholics in Seattle. Little did Fox know, in giving this talk, what the reverberations would be in Rome and how the rumblings from our current Pope would send shock waves to Chicago to California and eventually be felt in his life. Fox's calling to penetrate the roots of the creation-spirituality tradition in America led him into a direct confrontation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) spearheaded by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Complaints reached the inquisitional Cardinal in Rome from Seattle following Fox's keynote address for the gay and lesbian Catholic group Dignity and it was not long after he set up shop at Holy Names in Oakland that Ratzinger began his condemnation of the central thesis of Original Blessing, and Fox's treatment of homosexuality in that text aroused all of the Cardinal's anxiety, as he complained to the Father General, it "is neither inspired by Scriptures, nor by the Doctrine of the Church" (168). Part of Fox's vocation as an Episcopal priest, has been to restore into creation spirituality the erotic mysticism that the Church has been lacking, including a warm embrace of feminism and homosexuality. For surely, a central part of the evolution of Western spirituality, Fox asserts, has been not only to make it more ecumenical, but to make final "peace" with our sexuality (237). This battle is part and parcel of America's fight for spiritual democracy, as instanced by the poetry and prose of Whitman. Perhaps, because Ratzinger's complaints to the Magesterium were not completely unfounded, as there is no evidence in Scripture for the divinity of homosexuality, Fox found himself in the middle of a quarrel within the Catholic Church itself that had no apparent solution in sight, short of a possible end of the tyranny of the Roman Catholic era, in preparation for a rebirth of something entirely new. Such an end does not appear to be in sight, and being a visionary by nature, Fox was far ahead of his times. There is something, I believe, in his Bear-fight with the Vatican that is sure to please, or outrage readers, and it is this very involvement with issues that are in question today that can lift our spirits and deepen us down into a more feminine earth-based wisdom: Gaia as our Mother-wisdom. By moving us to listen to the ancient wisdom and voices of the Goddess (Godhead) and Native peoples of the earth (shamans and medicine people), we will hopefully open our ears to God's cosmic music of the spheres, and learn how to dance together, before it is too late. Fox's vision of the Bear and the Cosmic Christ instills hope in the future direction of religion. Only through the transformation of religion as we have known it, will a new birth in spirituality come about. Confessions gives me hope that spiritual democracy may indeed prove to be the way of the future.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderfully thoughtful book,
By
This review is from: Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest (Paperback)
A great book on the effect big government in the church has on people that speak their mind. As far as the reviewer that said - that this work was "too self involved"..... It's a memoir! Read the book.. It's worth it.
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