Matthew’s new book exists currently in audio (narrated by him) and in e-book format. We apologize to all those who have purchased an advance copy of the paperback book which we thought would be out by now. Apparently the colored pictures have contributed to a delay. We do expect its appearance any time now. Meanwhile, we recommend Matthew’s interview with Talia Baroncelli on TheAnalysis.news. Part II of that interview appears on Thursday this week. Thank you for your patience.
As a prelude to discussing my older brother’s new book, on becoming edGe-ucated: how uncertainty can link the frontiers of expert inquiry to the education of all*, I begin here with my own story about education.
Education has been at the heart of my vocation as a spiritual theologian. I intuited many years ago that one cannot teach spirituality in what I call a “European model of education,” i.e. with the rational brain alone.
In 1974, because of the success of my first book on spirituality, On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style (now called: Prayer: A Radical Response to Life), I was commissioned by the American Catholic bishops to make a study on education and spirituality.
The method I chose was to study and visit all the decent-sounding programs then operating in America and give an assessment. In one school, a twenty-something student said to me, “we are studying the mystics but not how to be mystics ourselves.” My conclusion overall was that all the programs were lacking in teaching people how to be mystics and prophets, and that our model of education was largely to blame.
In 1975 I published my findings in a Catholic religious education journal called Living Light, and proposed moving from religious to spirituality education. In it I offered a blueprint of what a more complete model of spiritual education would entail. That included stepping out of the rational brain exclusively, and doing daily circle dancing and art as meditation along with rational study, writing and debate.
There must be a doing element, a practicing element, to spiritual education and art as meditation. Doing filled that need, whether it was dance or painting, clay or chant, photography or clowning, music or massage poetry or sculpture, etc. After all, science students have laboratory as well as intellectual classes. Why not spirituality?
And thus was born ICCS, the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality for 7 years at Mundelein College in Chicago; then for 12 years at Holy Names College in Oakland; and then for 9 years at the University of Creation Spirituality. The balance of intellectual work and intuitive work was integral to all the programs that I fathered in creation spirituality.
I have spent my entire adult life teaching, designing and leading spirituality programs. Most were for adults (M.A. and D.Min. programs), but some were for children (one year I led a program for 10-year-olds) and for inner city teen-agers (the YELLAWE program: Youth and Elder Learning Laboratory for Ancestral Wisdom Education).
I wrote books on education, including The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human, as well as a chapter on education in my book on The Reinvention of Work. My memoir on Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest contains my many escapades in education. My book Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet is also integral to a spiritual education.
I give credit to my brother Tom for his educational practices that informed me along the way. Tomorrow we will begin to explore his book on edGe-ucation, a book that excites me which I received in the mail one week before he died.
To be continued.
* G. Thomas Fox, on becoming edGe-ucated: how uncertainty can link the frontiers of expert inquiry to the education of all. Reykjavik: Bósala Stúdenta, 2024.
See Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest, pp. 116f., 126-165, 327-362.
See also Fox, The Reinvention of Work, pp. 169-189.
And Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.
And Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life.
And Fox, Trump & the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner Image: Building minds, hearts, bodies, and community. Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you see education needing reinvention today? What are the elements you most want to see come to life?
Recommended Reading
Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest (Revised/Updated Edition)
Matthew Fox’s stirring autobiography, Confessions, reveals his personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey from altar boy, to Dominican priest, to his eventual break with the Vatican. Five new chapters in this revised and updated edition bring added perspective in light of the author’s continued journey, and his reflections on the current changes taking place in church, society and the environment.
“The unfolding story of this irrepressible spiritual revolutionary enlivens the mind and emboldens the heart — must reading for anyone interested in courage, creativity, and the future of religion.”
—Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic.
“Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin
Prayer: A Radical Response to Life
How do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? Fox defines prayer as a radical response to life that includes our “Yes” to life (mysticism) and our “No” to forces that combat life (prophecy). How do we define adult prayer? And how—if at all—do prayer and mysticism relate to the struggle for social and ecological justice? One of Matthew Fox’s earliest books, originally published under the title On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style, Prayer introduces a mystical/prophetic spirituality and a mature conception of how to pray. Called a “classic” when it first appeared, it lays out the difference between the creation spirituality tradition and the fall/redemption tradition that has so dominated Western theology since Augustine. A practical and theoretical book, it lays the groundwork for Fox’s later works. “One of the finest books I have read on contemporary spirituality.” – Rabbi Sholom A. Singer
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election
Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE.
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE.
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.
4 thoughts on “My and My Brother’s Story in Education”
I cannot re-invent education by myself or only in one sitting so I won’t try to. I did get extremely bored in school from say grades 5 to 8. Most was taught to the lowest common denominator, or they were destined to be left behind. In high school they were 3 steams: 5 years arts and sciences for the university bound; 4 years for the college (diploma, non degree) bound; and, 4 years for the vocational workforce bound whether for the trades, cooking, hair, etc. There was a good mix of science, music, language, arts, performing arts and shop classes.
I was in the 5 year program, but took many electives in shop. Learning about car engines and drive trains and systems was learning about how engineers created this marvel of transportation. Wood shop taught how we could fashion, say coffee tables out of once was just blocks of wood. Many of us have those tables decades later. Metal shop showed us how to bend and form metal into water-proof waste baskets for under a desk or in a shop. Drafting showed us how to look at everything from all sides – up down and left-side, right-side. Shop expanded our brains to see how craftsmen and engineers creatively created the world that we live in. That was great education. – BB.
A great life of creative accomplishment, Matthew!
Yes! You and your brother have contributed to the importance of active, participatory, compassionate, joyful creativity, and nature in our education of spirituality for children and adults to develop and maintain a living awareness in the Present Moment of the Loving, Creative, Compassionate Spirit in our inner and outer lives with one another and Beautiful Sacred Mother Nature with-in our LOVING DIVERSE WHOLENESS~ONENESS of our LIVING CREATIVE EVOLVING COSMOS….
Another Tom: Thomas Kuhn was a historian and philosopher of science who wrote the breakthrough book on the nature of scientific revolutions. His mind engaged the dialectal duality of mind and matter, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle, the second law of thermodynamics which reveals the strictures of closed entropic systems which lead to heat death….. all raising fundamental questions about our place in the universe. Orthodoxies being by nature ‘closed systems’.
Teachers who create an open system of learning invite their students to explore their personal universe which is also a dialectical dance between darkness and light, good and evil.
Salman Rushdie declared that his job is “to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, and ask difficult questions. Answers are cheap. Questions are hard to find. If you ask those questions and stir up society, that’s the proper function of a writer.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “In the Eleusinian mysteries, the key was hidden on the tongue, meaning the crux of a thing, the clue, the trace were in a special set of words, key questions.”