Reviews

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. (Apr.)

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.