Ungodly Rage by Steichen Donna

Author:Steichen, Donna [Steichen, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898703481
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

Intellectual Magpie

Fox’s 1989 sabbatical was welcome news to those concerned about the common good. Clearly, he ought to be prevented from spreading poison as a priest-theologian in apparently good standing. But the accompanying media flurry brought him attention far beyond his intellectual merits. Fox lacks stature as a theologian; in academic circles, he is not considered a serious figure. By comparison, men like Fathers Charles Curran, Richard McCormick, Hans Küng, David Tracy and perhaps even Richard McBrien look like flawed but credible scholars. They are dissenting theologians, and some of them are shallow. Fox, though he holds a doctorate in theology, is less a theologian than an intellectual magpie, collecting snips and snatches of other writers’ ideas, often distorted in translation or out of context, as though to dignify his absurd message by attributing his opinions to others. He even dares appropriate that giant of Dominicans, Saint Thomas Aquinas, as an earlier exponent of “creation-centered” mysticism.48 “Aquinas would be on my faculty if he were alive today”, says Fox.49 When Father John Boyle, president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and McBrien, head of Notre Dame’s theology department, spoke out to protest Fox’s silencing, both made it a point to say they were unfamiliar with his work. Apparently the lack of peer recognition hurts; he told National Catholic Reporter that his order had published a magazine “devoted to United States Dominican theologies”, but “I wasn’t in it”. His plaintive question: “If I’m not a United States Dominican theologian, what am I?”50

ICCS draws less than one hundred students each year (more than half of them nuns and priests) for a four-month sabbatical program, a nine-month certificate program or a nine-month master of arts degree program, in “Culture and Spirituality”, “Creation Spirituality and Geo-Justice” or “Creation Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology”. Nonetheless, Fox’s influence is pervasive, especially among women religious. ICCS graduates have gone on to careers in campus ministry, youth ministry, retreat centers, feminist organizations, Catholic schools and colleges and other parish and diocesan positions, including pastorates. And while Curran, McCormick and Tracy inflict their direct damage primarily on those in the academic world, Fox has long functioned as a side-show barker for an esoteric New Age religion, taking his mystical stew directly to the naive, the rebellious and the trendy. He reaches thousands with traveling workshops held throughout the United States and Canada and in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, often under Catholic auspices. In addition, he is executive editor of the glossy bi-monthly magazine Creation. Friends of Creation Spirituality, a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation, of which Fox was founding president, claims “25,000 adherents”.51 He is also the author of a dozen books, including such titles as On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear; Whee, We, Wee All the Way Home; A Spirituality Named Compassion; Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation; Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality and The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. At the Catholic bookshop in my hometown, employees tell me Fox is their top seller to nuns.

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