Now, I am glad that I was introduced to Aquinas' thought in my undergraduate studies (1962-1966) at Jesuit educational institutions through the required core courses in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. However, I am also glad that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church downgraded Aquinas a wee bit from his most favored status earlier in the twentieth century, because the downgrading of the pre-Vatican II Thomism opened the way for Matthew Fox and others to rediscover certain other themes in Aquinas' thought related to his contemplative spirituality.
The pre-Vatican II Thomism had understandably focused strongly on the massive introductory survey textbook that Aquinas had not yet completed before he died, the Summa Theologica. However, in the United States before Vatican II, the American non-Catholics Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler had contributed significantly to the status and prestige of Aquinas' Summa Theologica by including it in their 1952 edition of the Great Books of the Western World at a time when most white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) in the United States tended to be anti-Catholic.
Up to Vatican II, American Catholics tended to join other Catholics around the world in using pre-Vatican II Thomism as the weapon of choice to combat modernity which included many villains such as Descartes, Kant, Locke, and others. The historian Philip Gleason of Notre Dame captures this spirit of resisting and combatting modernity in the title of his 1995 book Contending with Modernity: [American] Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century.
In my estimate, the most perceptive book to emerge from this well-established guerilla war against modernity is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. St. Thomas Aquinas exemplifies the spirit of the Art of Discourse in his uncompleted Summa Theologica and his spirit of discourse is illustrated abundantly in the selections Fox has incorporated in Sheer Joy. Now, what Ong refers to as the Art of Reason characterizes major thinkers in the Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment, including the American Enlightenment as exemplified in the Declaration of Independence) such as Locke, Descartes, Kant, and others.
Ong's most detailed discussion of the history of Thomism can be found in his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God, the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Now, at the present time, we in Western culture tending to be distancing ourselves, to one degree or another, from modernity, for one reason or another. This distancing is often expressed by referring to post-modernity and post-modernism sweeping terminology that seems to include an enormous range of trends of thought. For Fox's purposes, he chooses to argue that he can update and adapt Aquinas' pre-modern cosmological orientation by re-framing of Aquinas' thought in the fourfold framework of creation spirituality in Sheer Joy to making his thought suitable for our post-modern sensibility.
Now, I will highlight here the following sixteen key relatively non-christocentric passages from Matthew Fox's Sheer Joy and, at times, provide relevant related reading for each of them.
(1) Page 100: "Sheer Joy is God's, and this demands companionship."
For related reading, see the 1987 book Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, translated by Colm Luibheid; foreword, notes, and translation collaboration by Paul Rorem; preface by Rene Roques; introductions by Jaroslav Pelikan, Jean Leclerq, and Karlfried Froehlich.
(2) Pages 105 and 106: "God is a Fountain of Total Beauty, the most beautiful and the super-beautiful."
For relevant related reading, see Carl Safina's 2020 book Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace.
(3) Page 134: "God made human beings like royal persons of lesser creatures, and human beings are 'with glory,' namely, with the clarity of the divine image. And this is a kind of crown for humanity."
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