Anglican Earth Day Daftness

It must be a comfort to Roman Catholic priests to know that if their theology becomes so outré that they are ejected from the Catholic Church, there will still be a home for them in Anglicanism. Mathew Fox, an ex Roman Catholic, is an Anglican priest in TEC where he feels quite at home; he pioneered the Techno Cosmic Mass:

An Episcopal priest and theologian who popularized the rave-like “Techno Cosmic Mass” and advocated goddess worship recently led a seminar on mysticism and Earth spirituality to coincide with Earth Day.

Warning that environmental degradation caused by raging against “Gaia” had to cease, the Rev. Matthew Fox made frequent references to “the Goddess” and the divine feminine during his environmentally-themed lecture and workshop, “Earth Spirituality and the Mystical Tradition.” The event was held in April at the Unitarian Universalist Church in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, and sponsored by the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.

Fox’s seminar was a melding of Celtic spirituality, goddess worship, panentheism (which posits that God interpenetrates every part of nature, but also transcends nature), environmental activism, and a political rejection of American “empire,” peppered sporadically with digs against the Vatican. Making references to Christian mystics like Hildegard of Bingen alongside pagan deities and the animal world, Fox comfortably oscillated between threats to polar bears and the oppression patriarchy when expressing his views on the natural world.

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