In this opening week, you’ll delve into Aquinas’ teachings and discover how they can guide you — and meet you right where you are in your struggles today.

You’ll explore his spiritual genius of profound substance — a fount of pre-modern wisdom for our post-modern times — and his ability to unite those of various traditions and no tradition at all. We all belong to nature, and Aquinas’ worldview begins with nature.

In this first module, you’ll explore stories from Aquinas’ adventurous life as you discover:

• What pre-modern consciousness and post-modern consciousness have in common — and why neither features human beings at the center
• How Aquinas welcomed truth from all spiritual traditions — affirming that “all truth comes from the Holy Spirit”
• Aquinas’ poetry, and its aesthetic and spiritual impact on the feminine dimensions of the Gothic revolution — exemplified by the rose windows at Notre-Dame de Paris
• The battles Aquinas fought on behalf of non-dualism, the unity of matter and spirit, and more
• Powerful stories from his eventful life

What happens to a society when science and spirituality split?

This week, you’ll explore how we’ve inherited a powerful split between religion and science. The result is a mainstream loss of respect for the sacredness of nature, and a loss of human dignity and moral direction.

When a society or educational system is cut off from intuition, says Matthew, it soon becomes a culture without values — merely mimicking inherited cultural values, without true self-reflection and cultural criticism.

While the modern era effectively killed the connection between science and religion, our post-modern era longs for it — and Aquinas has given us a powerful roadmap showing us the way forward.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• How the trust in the sacredness of creation that Aquinas espoused was ruptured by the 14th-century Black Death pandemic and subsequent guilt-based religions
• How science and spirituality can be renewed today in the face of the climate-change emergency
• M.C. Richards’ (poet, potter, and philosopher) perspective about what happens when science and spirituality split
• Why Aquinas tells us we’re here to get drunk on the universe — and why a mistake about creation results in a mistake about God
• The tenants of Aquinas’ green theology — and how it applies to your life today
• How our current ecological crisis grew out of scientific materialism and a broken religious consciousness that separated nature from the sacred
• A powerful practice to embody the greatness of the human person — and how it’s especially useful in our current time, when a new cosmology is being revealed through science

Who are you — and who are we, as a species?

Where do we want to go? And what sacrifices do we need to make to get there?

This week, you’ll explore how to cultivate your most noble sense of identity, according to Aquinas — and how our species’ current existential crisis is directly related to our identity crisis.

Increasingly violent and disruptive storms, droughts, floods, crop shortages, rising of seas, and pandemics are bearing down on us. We can’t face and overcome these crises without understanding who we are as a species.

Aquinas was a committed student of human nature — not only because he studied the advanced writings of Aristotle, Moses Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, and others… but he also synthesized them and taught us how important it is to put them into action.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• How to cultivate joy — what Aquinas calls the human’s noblest act
• How to harness the power of simultaneous being and doing states of existence
• The ways the young and old experience the Divine
• Why your creativity is nothing less than the Holy Spirit working through you
• The ways your powers of courage, playfulness, magnanimity, compassion, and justice-making are essential to your adult spirituality
• How to enter your house of wisdom and gain clarity around your identity through your meditation practice — cultivating what Aquinas calls the wonderful communion of body and soul, matter and spirit, wisdom in action

If human beings are spiritual beings, then we must explore the spiritual journey more deeply.

This week, the first of Aquinas’ 4 Paths of Spiritual Experience, Via Positiva, will guide you through this transformative process.

Experience alone is not sufficient for learning about and teaching spirituality. We also need concepts, according to Aquinas. Among these experiences and concepts is the Via Positiva, the tasting of original goodness — and awe and wonder.

As you focus on the beauty and goodness of creation, you’ll soak up Aquinas’ powerful truth — that both the poet and the scientist begin at the same place: with the wonder of creation.

As you’ll discover, wonder opens the mind and the heart, ultimately leading you to a sense of profound gratitude.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• Aquinas’ doctrine of original goodness
• How we all undergo both the First Resurrection (waking up in this lifetime) and the Second Resurrection
• Why Aquinas believed every being is a name for God
• How to access the sheer joy of God — and experience God as what Aquinas calls supersubstantial beauty and a fountain of total beauty
• How to meditate deeply on nature and its goodness as you allow Aquinas to coach you

This week, you’ll discover Aquinas’ respect and appreciation for the quiet, dark, and still path of cultivating your soul.

You’ll explore the second of the 4 Paths of Spiritual Experience, Via Negativa, which includes silence and emptying of the mind as you move into meditation.

Matthew will also walk you through the deep experience of loss and suffering we encounter in the Dark Night of the Soul — and how valuable an experience that can be.

Through the wisdom he’s left behind, Aquinas invites you to an encounter with the God of darkness and the mystery of silence — reminding you that every being is a name for God, and no being is a name for God.

As you discover Aquinas’ teachings on meditation, you’ll see they even line up with the Buddhists’ practice of letting go of your discursive brain — and find rest from your busy mind.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• Silence as a doorway to wisdom
• How Aquinas is calling us to respect the mystery dimension of what we can actually discuss about God — and not speak glibly and incessantly about the Divine
• What it means to know God as the “One Unknown”
• Aquinas’ belief that the greatest accomplishment of the human mind is knowing that it does not know who God is
• What Aquinas learned when he was struck mute by a mystical experience during the final year of his life

Art and creativity play a significant role in Aquinas’ view of the world and in his theology — indeed, he frequently referred to God as the artist of artists.

This week, you’ll discover how creativity is the work of the Holy Spirit — and how a theology of creativity is a theology of spirit…

These teachings took root within the imagination of Aquinas’ disciple Meister Eckhart, who went on to further deepen understanding of the role of the artist — and of the spirit and creativity — in humanity’s development and expression.

In the Via Creativa (the third of the 4 Paths of Spiritual Experience), the image of God in the human comes to its fullness. Virtues are the habits you choose to cultivate — they create your personality and values, and the character you birth and bring to the world.

You’ll also explore how, with Eckhart and later with Julian of Norwich — both influenced heavily by Aquinas’ teachings — the role of the creatrix, the Motherhood of God, became more richly developed.

And you’ll discover how the beauty that humans are and that humans create is a participation in the overall dance of Divine Beauty in creation…

In this class, you’ll:

• Experience how humans become co-workers with God and how our creativity is our way of giving thanks
• Become aware of the intrinsic connection between wisdom and creativity
• Learn how all created things may be called God’s works of art
• Explore the dark side of creativity — why humans can birth great evil, and how, according to Aquinas, one human being can do ten thousand times more harm than a beast
• Understand what it means to bear good fruit, why the effects of love should be displayed as well as felt, and the importance of sharing your light — not just being enlightened
• Discover how building your character and choosing to walk a path of virtues is the work of creativity and the Via Creativa

In your closing class, Matthew will share how your creative energies can go to work to heal the world — as you respond to Aquinas’ invitation to use your creative impulse for the greater good.

To avoid merely inflating ego, amassing power, or otherwise doing evil, creativity needs a direction — and the final of the 4 Paths of Spiritual Experience, the Via Transformativa, can be your guide.

Your work is born of Spirit with both your inner and outer work finding their fulfilment in justice and compassion. Indeed, justice is the most important of all the virtues, according to Aquinas. And justice and compassion are the best names for God.

Aquinas lays out an entire theology of work — including how the Holy Spirit works through us as we do our good work in the world, giving back to others.

In this final module, you’ll explore:

• Why Aquinas teaches that political science is more important than the science of medicine   — and how the common good transcends the individual good of one person
• How compassion and justice go together — and how liberation is a synonym for salvation
• Ways to develop your prophetic vocation, including the positive role that anger and moral outrage play
• How conscience is integral to a life of justice — and why it’s more important to obey your sense of conscience than to obey unjust laws
• Why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked Aquinas in his iconic “Letter From Birmingham Jail”
• Why salvation primarily means to preserve things in the good and how this creates a foundation for an eco-theology
• How you can arrive at a vision of God through justice, why justice-making is itself a spiritual practice — and how joy and playfulness accompany you throughout this journey

Discover how Christianity once celebrated beauty, compassion, and justice — and provided a path of positive knowledge and ecstatic connection with all of creation. Matthew Fox and Jaih Hunter-Hill (public speaker and mechanical engineer) dive deep into Matthew’s daring view of historical Christianity — and a theologically sound basis for personal discovery of spiritual liberation.

In this powerful dialogue, Matthew Fox and Brian Thomas Swimme (professor, author, and cosmologist) discuss how those who feel called by their faith to take action face a challenging future — and deserve deep wisdom from the past to succeed. Listen as Matthew and Brian unpack the wisdom and direction Thomas Aquinas left behind for becoming courageous and creative in thought, spirit, and action.

Jerry Maynard, priest and Catholic worker activist, has said that we must not let external forces stop us from giving birth to global justice and cosmic oneness. Follow along with this powerful dialogue as Jerry and Matthew discuss how to embrace Thomas Aquinas’ wisdom and get to work.

Absorb the wisdom of Matthew Fox and author Adam Bucko (co-author of Occupy Spirituality and The New Monasticism) as they discuss how Thomas Aquinas’ wisdom offers us a roadmap for spirituality in action — and can help us overcome today’s specific elements of greed, despair, and the threat of extinction.