Please note: This is a reminder that Matthew will be writing the Daily Meditations for Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays; and Gianluigi Gugliermetto (GG) will be writing those published on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Matthew will continue to offer a video teaching each Monday.
June 9, 2025: Thank You, Walter Brueggemann! (MF)
Matthew shares the news of the passing of theologian Walter Brueggemann at the age of 92. Brueggemann was an inspiration to Matthew. In fact, Matthew cited him 11 times in his Original Blessing book, and on his bookshelves he had at least six of Brueggemann’s books. One of Matthew’s favorite quotations from Brueggemann is from his book, The Prophetic Imagination: “Every totalitarian regime is frightened by the artist….Indeed, poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality.” He was a brilliant and passionate man who will be missed.
June 10, 2025: A Report From the Front Line re the Upcoming Senate Budget Bill (MF)
With regard to the big, bad budget bill sitting before the Senate, Matthew’s niece, a Ph.D. nurse practitioner, sent him a report from the frontlines of a clinic where she works. She said: For the past four months, I have been working primarily with people who have been pushed to the margins of society….I asked a 23-year-old woman who came in with abdominal pain what she eats, and she said, “I don’t eat much because I can’t afford food.” I offered to help her apply for SNAP or connect her with a food pantry, and she said, “I already get assistance, but I use it for my kids. They’re growing, and there’s not much left for me.” …Another patient told me he had $60 left for groceries with two weeks to go in the month because he had to buy medications that should have been covered…. These are not isolated stories. This is every week in every clinic day in waiting rooms across this country. People absolutely will die because of this legislation now before the Senate.
June 11, 2025: Chaos, Cruelty, and Education (GG)
GG, from his vantage point as a European who once spent a good deal of time in the U.S., notes the constitutional crisis we are embroiled in. He understands our pain, and he also finds it rather karmic due to the coups that were precipitated by CIA actions in the past. A former student of GG’s, having been very ill in 2006 because of his handling of depleted uranium ammunitions in Iraq, reported that the Abu Ghraib scandal was “nothing” compared to the cruelty that his battalion committed there. The memory of this student brings sadness to GG, who says, “I don’t know if he lives or not, I could never find him again. He was himself a victim, of course, and — as he recognized — a perpetrator.” GG encourages us: “Resisting chaos and cruelty is no small feat, but it can be done step by step and day by day, together.”
June 12, 2025: Stability and Empathy (GG)
Recently, we read the words of Matthew’s niece who said, “To me, liberty and justice for all has to mean that people get to live with dignity, hope, and with some kind of stability.” GG suggests that this is a good summary of how American democracy should be. It states the basics without which societies collapse. His niece also suggests that if we sat next to people and listened to their stories, we would be changed by them. GG says that he sadly disagrees that those in the White House (and their supporters) would be moved. He suggests that those exhibiting this current level of cruelty are incapable of suddenly becoming empathetic. Gustave Gilbert, the psychologist who served at the Nuremberg trials in 1945, famously said: “Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, who was kidnapped and killed in Gaza in 2011, had a motto. “Let us stay human.” Perhaps we need to paint that on the walls of every American city.
June 13, 2025: The Power of Words
In this DM we explore the power of words, whether in incantations and spells, words employed in rituals, the convincing rhetoric of proclamations, or the transforming force of poetry. At a time like ours, when “dogs are snarling and prowling about the city” (Psalm 59:14), it is especially relevant to remember the lesson by Marshall Rosenberg about jackal and giraffe language. Essentially, we are all trained to speak jackal, and thus hurt our opponents, but we could be just as effective — while holding strongly to our truth — by speaking giraffe. If the human world is sick, and the human world is made essentially with words, we can perhaps shift the world by shifting the way we speak with one another.
June 14, 2025: Celebrating Father’s Day Tomorrow & No Kings Day Today (MF)
This weekend is packed with all kinds of events focused on both the healthy and unhealthy aspects of masculinity. Yesterday, Matthew was part of a conference on “Healthy Masculinity.” Today is “No Kings” Day, in which protests throughout the country and in every state (about 2000 planned thus far) stand up against the authoritarianism being displayed so cruelly in the U.S. right now. (Find out about one near you HERE.) These protests are in part because the man who sits in the White House is throwing himself an enormous (and enormously arrogant and costly) birthday present consisting of a military parade, complete with armored tanks. Then, Sunday is, of course, Father’s Day. May we all be loving fathers who operate from the inside out and work to protect our country, democracy, families, and world.
Banner image: Sign at Hands Off Protest in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Photo by Cynthia Greb. Used with permission.
Recommended Reading
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
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.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation
Authors Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox encourage us to use our talents in service of compassion and justice and to move beyond our broken systems–economic, political, educational, and religious–discovering a spirituality that not only helps us to get along, but also encourages us to reevaluate our traditions, transforming them and in the process building a more sacred and just world. Incorporating the words of young activist leaders culled from interviews and surveys, the book provides a framework that is deliberately interfaith and speaks to our profound yearning for a life with spiritual purpose and for a better world.
“Occupy Spirituality is a powerful, inspiring, and vital call to embodied awareness and enlightened actions.”
~~ Julia Butterfly Hill, environmental activist and author of The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods
