Matthew Fox

Matthew Fox is an internationally acclaimed spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist. He has written thirty books that have been translated into forty-three languages and have received numerous awards. Among his books are Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Creation Spirituality, A Spirituality Named Compassion, The Reinvention of Work, The Hidden Spirituality of Men, and Christian Mystics. He has contributed much to the rediscovery of Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas as pre-modern mystics and prophets.

As an activist, his interests have been the renewal of education and of religion. He established the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality that flourished for twenty-one years, until Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) silenced him and eventually shut down the program and expelled him from the Dominican Order, of which he had been a member for thirty-four years. He then founded his own university in downtown Oakland, the University of Creation Spirituality, which flourished for nine years. Now Matthew is applying the same pedagogy to reinventing education from the inner city by working with inner-city teenagers, a pilot program having run two years in Oakland and having spawned three programs in Chicago.

Since joining the Episcopal church sixteen years ago, Matthew has been working with young people to reinvent forms of worship by bringing elements of rave, such as dance, dj, vj and more into the Western Liturgy. The Cosmic Mass he created has been celebrated over ninety times and in dozens of cities in North America.