The Christian Mystics: Wisdom for Our Time

Matthew Fox

Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America.

Learn more

Matthew has the scholarship, the imagination, the courage, the writing skill to fulfill this role at a time when the more official Christian theological traditions are having difficulty in establishing any vital contact with either the spiritual possibilities of the present or with their own most creative spiritual traditions of the past. He is a spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist for gender justice and eco-justice. He has written 37 books that have been translated into other languages over 70 times. Among them are Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, A Spirituality Named Compassion, The Reinvention of Work, The Hidden Spirituality of Men, Christian Mystics and The Pope’s War. He has contributed much to the rediscovery of Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas as pre-modern mystics and prophets. Fox holds a doctorate in the history and theology of spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris. The founder of the University of Creation Spirituality in California, he conducts dozens of workshops each year and is a visiting scholar at the Academy for the Love of Learning. In joining the Episcopal church over 20 years ago, Fox has been working with young people to reinvent forms of worship by bringing elements of rave such as dance, dj, vj and more into the Western Liturgy. The Cosmic Mass has been celebrated over 100 times and in dozens of cities in North America. Fox is recipient of the Abbey Courage of Conscience Peace Award (other recipients being the Dali Lama, Mother Teresa, Ernesto Cardenal and Rosa Parks), the Ghandi King Ikeda Award, the Tikkun National Ethics Award and other awards. His latest books are Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; and The Lotus & the Rose: A Conversation Between Tibetan Buddhism & Mystical Christianity. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Academy of the Love of Learning in Santa Fe, NM and resides in Vallejo, California.

Ruby Reed

Ruby co-founded Advaya in 2015 and Earthed in 2023. She is a community builder, curator, creator and lover of water fascinated by how we relate to the world around us.

Learn more

Ruby Reed is passionate about bringing people together in offline and online spaces that reframe how we see the world around us, and our role within it, so we recognise our ecological relationality, fall more in love with life, and actively participate in its ecological and spiritual regeneration. She is a community builder and a key figure in the UK alternative education space, where she takes an integrated and holistic approach with her work spanning a vast ecosystem and network from climate to psychedelics. Together with her sister Christabel Reed, Ruby has founded a number of organisations. Ruby is the co-founder of transformative education and experience platform Advaya (founded 2015), as well as the co-founder and Director of Initiative Earth Charity and its Ecosystem Restoration and nature skills platform Earthed (founded 2023) and climate action campaign EcoResolution (2018-2022). She is a core team member of Medicine Festival since its inception in 2019, where she curates and hosts the talks stage and speakers across site and part of Be The Earth Foundation’s Flow Funding network. In 2018-2020 she led wellbeing across environmental action protests in the UK, setting up marquees and programmes in key sites across London as well as retreats for activists and changemakers. Ruby has had the enormous privilege of learning directly from wisdom carriers, philosophers, indigenous leaders, academics, visionaries, economists and scientists from around the world. Her main interests are metaphysics and consciousness and how our relationship with these shapes our worldviews and cultures as a species. The idea of “transform your mind, transform your world” guides her work. She is passionate about the ocean and has been a yoga practitioner, diver and swimmer since childhood. Between 2014 and 2021 she taught yoga as a qualified yoga therapist, led nature-based retreats, and was also a competitive freediver. These days she simply enjoys swimming on the surface, which keeps her connected and happy. Before starting her own projects, Ruby was an advisor, researcher and writer for leading art collectors in the UK and completed two Masters degrees in History of Art at Edinburgh University (ideal beauty and the body in the dawning of the enlightenment c.17th) and The Courtauld Institute (Latin American countercultures c.20th). She was set on academia and due to start a PhD at Oxford before having a change of heart and took a role in Private Sales at the auction house Christie’s in Private Sales (2012-2015).