This is a summary of the previous week’s daily meditations. Father Adam Bucko (AB) is guest writer this week for Friday and Saturday. You can click on any title to view the DM in its entirety. Also, remember that each Monday DM continues to offer a video teaching by Matthew Fox. Thank you for your loyal readership.
February 16, 2026: Saints Among Us: Encouraging and Good News (MF)
Matthew proposes that Time Magazine make its “person of the year” award early, and give it to the people of Minneapolis who march and support their fellow citizens during this horrific invasion of their city by ICE henchmen (and women). But lo and behold! There is now a movement underfoot by the editors of The Nation to give a Nobel Peace Prize to the city of Minneapolis and its people.* Another bit of good news is the completion of the Buddhist monks’ 108-day, 2300-mile walking pilgrimage for Peace that ended on Thursday in Washington D.C. In the words of the Venerable Ratanaguna: This is an assembly made up of people of all races and cultures without distinctions of faith or religion. People from all walks of life coming together here in the spirit of unity, love, empathy, and understanding.**
February 17, 2025: Joel Primack: The Passing of a Special Man and Scientist (MF)
Recently, Matthew attended a Celebration of Life for physicist and cosmologist Joel Primack. He and his wife, Nancy Abrams, co-authored two very important books, The View From the Center of the Universe and The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World. During the celebration, his support of women scientists and students was recalled, and his major role and courage in co-founding the Union of Concerned Scientists which resisted the Vietnam War.*** One of the things Matthew shared in his remarks was the following quotation from Aquinas: “The most excellent thing in the universe is not the human. The most excellent thing in the universe is the universe itself, and all beings are here to serve the universe.”
February 18, 2025: Joel Primack Eulogy, continued (MF)
We continue with more excerpts from Matthew’s eulogy of Joel Primack. Geologian Thomas Berry used to say, “We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being. Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality.…” In their book on cosmology and society, Joel and Nancy instruct us to “think cosmically, but act globally.” They call for a “purified religion” that does not live in the past but honors the meaning of the universe and our special place in it. Joel was humble, close to the earth (humus), as well as close to the stars….Joel taught us about our kinship to the stars and our origins and sacred relationship to Father Sky, Mother Earth and one another. What an extraordinary man!
February 19, 2026: Not Only Epstein, But MAGA’s EPA Is Now Victimizing Children (MF)
The Epstein files reveal that billionaires and other powerful men the world over have been involved in abusing over 1200 women and children. UN experts say we are talking about a scale that amounts to crimes against humanity.**** Meanwhile, there are also efforts to destroy and dismantle laws and regulations passed to defend Mother Earth from poisonous air, soil, and waters. This is another form of attack which effects our children, as well as future generations. Part of the strategy of Project 2025 has been to so flood the news with multiple bad headlines every day so that chaos becomes the name of the game. The fate of Mother Earth is often neglected by the media who relegate it to the inner pages when it deserves to be center stage. One cannot imagine a more thorough rejection of Pope Francis’s call for “care for our common home” in his groundbreaking encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Sí.”
February 20, 2026: Wisdom from Adam Bucko: The Image of God as Defiant Language (AB)
(Matthew welcomes guest writer Fr. Adam Bucko for today’s and tomorrow’s DM. He is the author of Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation.) Adam tells us that he was co-facilitating a retreat for homeless youth in upstate New York. He says: A young girl named Ebony approached me….Painful things from her past were beginning to surface….Seeing her pain…I encouraged her to go for a walk around the chapel and find three objects in nature that represented some of what she was feeling.…One of Ebony’s objects was a flower that had not yet bloomed. .I suggested that Ebony take her three objects into the chapel and spend some time in prayer and meditation.…Some time later, I noticed her from a distance running toward me with a big smile…. (She said) “I was holding (the blossom) in my hands while praying with my eyes closed, and I felt something. I felt like all those struggles I was feeling but could not express in words just dissolved, and there was this sense of relief and peace. When I opened my eyes, I was shocked. The flower I had been holding opened and bloomed while I was praying.”
February 21, 2026: Adam Bucko on Holiness & The Image & Likeness of God, continued (AB)
(By Father Adam Bucko.) Howard Thurman understood both how fragile and how powerful is the truth that the human being is made in God’s image and likeness. Thurman wrote and taught during a time of segregation and racial terror. He knew that when the world tries to define you as less than human, you must return again and again to that inward altar, where your dignity is anchored in God and not in the approval of the powerful. Adam quotes Matthew: We see such courage and holiness playing out in the streets of Minneapolis these days by ordinary citizens, at least two of whom have been murdered and martyred by ICE, which is our government at work. Saints act on their moral outrage. Says Adam: Holiness is not some kind of abstract perfection. It is conscience made public. It is defiant language.
* The Editors, “Help Minneapolis Get a Nobel Peace Prize,” The Nation, February 12, 2026.
** Meghan Cook, “Buddhist monks walked 108 days straight from Texas to DC in a walk for Peace,” MSN, February 13, 2026.
***Kenneth Chang, “Joel Primack, Physicist Who Helped Explain the Cosmos, Dies at 80” New York Times, January 17, 2026
****”Epstein files suggest acts that may amount to crimes against humanity, say UN experts” Reuters, on The Guardian, February 17, 2026
Banner image: “Protect what you Love.” Sign at a protest in suburban Pennsylvania. Photo by Cynthia Greb is used with permission.
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action, by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation, by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
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