Week of 2/3-8/2025: The Four Paths & Overcoming Evil

2/07/2025

As the results of the election ripple out, learn the deeper stakes involved. Get your copy of Trump & the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election today! Choose your format in the book block below.

February 3, 2025: Deepening Our Spiritual Warriorhood with John of the Cross & Others

A reader asked, “How can we sustain ourselves in such trying times?” As we wrestle with our call as mystics, prophets and spiritual warriors, Matthew suggests the Four Paths as a spiritual tool. He cites St. John of the Cross as a powerful example of one who faced terribly difficult times in the face of daily beatings and abuse within a Carmelite prison and who used his creative gifts to persevere. His poem on the Dark Night reveals that challenging time. He speaks of the power of silence and emptying, the Via Negativa, and the healing power of art as the Via Creativa and Transformativa. His poem, The Canticle, is a shining example of the Via Positiva.
John of the Cross, depicted by an unknown artist in 1656.
From the Archdiocesan Museum in Katowice, Poland. Wikimedia Commons.

February 4, 2025: The Four Paths: Practice for the Spiritual Warrior in Us All

As fascist authoritarianism and oligarchy invades our country from within, it is time for our spiritual warrior to stand up and be counted. Matthew says in Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ that we must be like camels that fill their hump with water in order to walk through a dry and parched desert. This means a spiritual warrior must be ever more in love with life, ever more committed to biophilia, ever more thankful for life and breath and one’s time on Earth.

Drinking all that beauty in is what the Via Positiva is all about. And this will give us energy to walk through the dark valleys and parched deserts.
February 5, 2025: If the Anti-Christ Were President, He Might Be Thinking This….

I will destroy democracy and replace it with an autocracy or oligarchy of billionaires who will be beholden to me. I will expel all government workers who do not kneel and adore me. This includes all FBI personnel who investigated the January 6 insurrectionists. I will fire all DOJ lawyers who investigated the same event. I will appoint a head of FBI and a head of DOJ who go after my enemies.

I will require no-conscience obedience from all congressmen and women in my party. I will kill as many environmental laws as I possibly can—to hell with Climate Change and the future of the planet. I will expel all Palestinians from Gaza and build a resort there. I will expel millions of immigrants and their families and lock them up in Guantanamo Bay prison.

‘Catastrophic to national security’: FBI agents issue warning over threats of mass firings

“Catastrophic to national security”: Michael Clark, President of the Society of former FBI Special Agents, joins Nicolle Wallace to discuss growing fears of the current junta purging the FBI. MSNBC

February 6, 2025: Actions People are Taking to Combat Today’s Purge, Coup & Democracide

One fine organization that has arisen to take action during this time is Indivisible. It bears all the marks of a community of spiritual warriors, such as we have been meditating on lately. Here is one action you can take: If you are concerned with a president giving an unelected individual, Elon Musk, access to your personal information as maintained by the Treasury Department, The Privacy Act of 1974 states: No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of the individual to whom the record pertains……. Send this, with your signature to privacy@treasury.gov.

See what the Indivisible movement is doing and join in the action HERE.

February 7, 2025: The Coup & You & US: Time For Spiritual Warriorhood

This is a time for spiritual warriorhood, of this there is no doubt. Here are some headlines from a concerned and thoughtful press, the very press that the current regime is trying to destroy. Regarding Trump’s promise to “take over” Gaza and “own” it, with Netanyahu smiling at his side, David Remnick says: Such a policy represents ethnic cleansing.

Morality is of no interest where there is a real estate deal to be made.* Michael Moore: “The actual Coup in DC is underway.” Moore says that we can stop the two guilty parties through the courts, in Congress, through mass actions of civil disobedience, and calling on police to join with us “to block the only person the Supreme Court has declared can break the law.”** From Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: “Of course it’s a coup: Miss the obvious, lose your republic.”***

February 8, 2025: Bad Religion’s Role in the Current Coup

Russell Vought, the newly voted-in Director of the OMB, is a Christian nationalist and a prime architect of Project 2025.

But Vought’s Christianity is clearly at odds with a healthy Christianity that teaches truth-telling, love, justice and compassion. Matthew says that Project 2025 is full of antichrist values. Interestingly, the day Vought was approved by the Republican senate this week, President Trump appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast and announced that he would be signing a new executive order to appoint AG Pam Bondi to head a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” in the government, and would create a new “presidential commission on religious liberty” headed by televangelist Paula White. So much for the separation of Church and State. And who determines what is “Christian” and what is “anti-Christ Christian”?

Black pastor says “what Trump represents is ANTICHRIST”, REBUKES Project 2025: It’s STRAIGHT FROM HE

Pastor calls trump the Antichrist and says Project 2025 is “straight from hell.” Roland S. Martin

* David Remnick, “The Madness of Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2025.

** Michael Moore, “The Coup D’Etat has Begun.”

*** Timothy Snyder, “Of course it’s a coup: Miss the obvious, lose your republic.” Substack

Banner image: Time for spiritual warriors to rise up and slay the beast. “David and Goliath.” Painting attributed to Charles Errard

For a list of organizations helping those affected by the devastating LA wildfires, please see this article from ABCNews HERE and the evolving AltadenaStrong hub page HERE.

Responses are welcomed. To add your comment, or read other comments and enter into dialog, please click HERE to go to our website and scroll down to the Comments field.

Recommended Reading

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.

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

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

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God