Autor: mendocinomx

The Spirit connecting the peripheries

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Since the end of the last century, humanity's religions have updated their mission, realizing the growing poverty and injustice in the world, accompanied by wars promoted by corrupt leaders, where religion was used as a weapon of exclusion and violence.

The Parliament of the World's Religions with the project of a global ethic (Toward a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration) where the contribution of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng stood out, or the Earth Charter Promoted by, among others, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, along with several spiritual leaders, they sounded the alarm to mobilize religions to stop the spiral of hatred that is spreading across the planet, turning to the sources of human interiority that religions have cultivated for millennia as a source of peace.

However, many of these initiatives, while they managed to raise awareness among their leaders and communities as well as in the media of the urgent task of building peace with justice and truth, did not always listen to the knowledge and spirituality of people and communities in their daily struggles to defend human life, rivers, forests and mineral, plant and animal species that inhabit the face of the earth but are threatened by the sixth mass extinction underway (What is the sixth mass extinction and what can we do about it?).

Second and third generation liberation theologies, as we have already analyzed in the Mexican context (Liberation Theology in Mexico: Creative Reception of the Second Vatican Council), have shifted the perspective by placing the victims of global violence themselves at the center as "knowers," that is, experts in humanity thanks to the resilience that has transformed into resistance. Above all, it must be emphasized that, from this experience of vulnerability, these survivors have recognized themselves as privileged interlocutors of Divinity. Indeed, the victims seek to re-exist with new modes of communal organization, agroecological work, and diverse spiritualities. These practices emerge precisely from the people and communities themselves who are threatened by systems of domination.

Feminist ecotheology, developed by Ivonne Gebara (Ecofeminism: A Latin American Perspective) in Brazil and Marilú Rojas (The relevance of ecofeminist theology and its political impact on current femicide and ecocide) in Mexico, took a radical turn in thinking about the interconnections between the faith of excluded women, their violated bodies and territories, as well as their ancestral knowledge of care and resistance as the beginning of a world change where a new face of divine Sophia is revealed.

Thus, an increasingly clear awareness emerged among religions and social movements to listen to those who live on the peripheries of the world of wealth and privilege, to explore how "another world is possible" from those social and religious margins.

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Since 2015, a group of university students, along with artists and social movements in defense of the territory in Mexico – with the advice of Gustavo Esteva (Center for Intercultural Meetings and Dialogues) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos with his Conversations of the World With several authors from the epistemic South such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui – we began to explore ways to decolonize the university and learn to “weave voices for the common home” (Weaving voices). Thus, we learned the demands of attentive listening to those living on the peripheries, who are not only victims but individuals and collectives who create processes of awakening, healing, and embodying together, and thus weave together knowledge that expresses their ways of life, community organization, and their profound spirituality of life.

In 2019, we continued this path by analyzing various voices of decolonial theology at a conference (Congress on resistance and spiritualities) organized jointly by the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, the international journal of theology Concilium, and the Dominican University Cultural Center of Mexico to explore together the common features of resistance to systemic violence and the spiritualities that arise from it.

In 2023, a group of university colleagues, with the support of Mexican civil society organizations and ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara in Mexico, managed to bring together more than thirty groups from Latin America (Re-Exists! The spirit crossing peripheries) with the aim of understanding the new forms of life, subjectivity, and communality that individuals and communities of survivors are weaving together. We sought a way to glimpse hope amidst the horror of clandestine graves in Mexico, discrimination based on gender, race, and social status, the devastation of Mother Earth, as well as to explore the rituals that emerge from these practices of resistance. graphic memory of that congress, with his documentary that includes some interviews, can give an idea of what we experienced at that meeting.

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Now comes the time for the next phase of Re-exist that will emphasize the connections survivors make and the strength that animates them.

This time, it is a meeting-festival with two novel and challenging features: interculturality as a way of existence and thought, to "rethink as a species," according to the call of the scientific community, closely linked to interreligious dialogue as the only viable way to approach the sacred.

We propose to explore together the paths of re-existence in this hour of collapse of the modern civilizational model, where the genocide in Gaza has put humanity in jeopardy and becomes a touchstone for human civilization.

Through three steps we will explore the wake up in the face of the horror that each collective has faced. We will continue analyzing the heal as personal and collective actions of memory, truth and justice that allow victims to rebuild their lives. Then we will be able to access the moment of support each other with new forms of communality.

Collectives of women from India facing patriarchal violence in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian religions will enter into mutual accompaniment with mothers of the disappeared in Mexico. Caretakers of Mother Earth from the Jesuit mission of Bachajón in Chiapas will dialogue with leaders of the Lakota people who work on collective memory to heal from the colonial past, while recovering their ancestral forms of agriculture through traditional diets, the cultivation of local plants, and the rediscovery of rituals such as the Inipi or ritual bathing which is a creation of communality, or the buffalo dance as one of the main symbols of the sacredness of earth and sky.

Stay tuned on social media Re-exists 2025 where brief informative capsules, interviews, and graphic memories of these moments will be published, which we hope will be like glimpses of life that resists and re-exists, because the strength of the survivors is animated by the divine Ruah that flutters over chaos to bring forth life in the midst of death.

Guadalajara, September 20, 2025

September 20, 2025
“Paroxysm,” Iván Gardea, etching, Cuernavaca, 2019

The monstrosity of religion On an ongoing modern debate

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This week I was invited to the presentation in Cuernavaca of a book that contains a failed conversation between John Milbank, a British Anglican theologian, and Slavo Žižek, a Slovenian atheist philosopher, about the monstrosity of Christ (The monstrosity of Christ: paradox or dialectic?). The Spanish translation was published by the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, at the initiative of Ángel Méndez Montoya, as part of an innovative publishing program to offer readers in Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world current theological debates surrounding God as an ontological problem, as a source of ethical meaning in a modern civilization shaken to its foundations, and as a political problem.

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Before attending the presentation at the Miguel Salinas Gallery Library of the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, located in the historic center of the city in an old house restored as a cultural center, I had the fortune of talking with the Juarez artist Iván Gardea, when visiting his exhibition at the Borda Garden which is open to the public until the end of September.

Maestro Gardea, in addition to being an impressive engraver in the most rigorous Mexican tradition of printmaking that dates back to Posadas and the Taller de Gráfica Colectiva a century ago, is a born thinker, well-versed in literature, music, philosophy, and theology. We met in his studio six years ago to prepare for the exhibition of his series of prints on violence inspired by the thought of René Girard. We held this exhibition at the Andrea Pozzo Gallery of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 2019, on the occasion of the international conference "Resist! Violence, Resistance, and Spiritualities," organized jointly by the Jesuit university and the International Journal of Theology Concilium, where I had the opportunity to serve on the board of directors and editorial board for eight years.

During our conversation in the bright colonial courtyard of the Jardín Borda, Iván told me stories about his ongoing artwork, a series of prints specifically about the monstrosity of the sacred in today's society, lost between Western liberalism, "devoid of any belief," and the materialistic atheisms that abound in both academic and social circles. In Iván's opinion, although I correctly interpret it, this monstrosity has many facets, among them nihilism as a way of life without hope. I was greatly surprised to hear his reflections, since that same afternoon we were to discuss the "monstrosity" of Christ in the Žižek-Milbank debate.

So I briefly summarized the ideas I would later express regarding that book, alternating with my beloved colleagues Sylvia Marcos, a renowned gender anthropologist in Mesoamerica who met Žižek in Slovenia; Ángel Méndez, a queer theologian who worked on his doctoral thesis on the theology of food under Milbank's supervision; and Nicolás Panotto, an Argentine Protestant theologian with whom I share projects in the "Theology After Gaza" group convened two years ago by Mitri Raheb to rethink political theology.

In the cloister of the Borda Garden, I commented to Iván that, in my opinion, the monstrosity that was important to discern today was that of the religion that perverts the sacred, expressed as Jewish and Christian Zionism, associated with far-right movements around the world that, in the name of God, not only pervert the Bible in their theology of election and promise, but also incite genocidal violence by manipulating the religious sentiment of entire communities. Another example is the case of televangelist Paula White in the White House advising Trump, his vice president Vince, and Secretary of State Rubio in a crusade to bring their country "back to Christian values."

Another emblematic example of the monstrosity of religion within religious institutions are the criminal cases of manipulation of religion by corrupt leaders, creating financial empires based on boundless ambition and controlling the dormant masses. This phenomenon has produced corruption among political, social, and religious elites in various parts of the world, accompanied by sexual and spiritual abuse, and the trafficking of political and financial privileges by perverse religious figures such as Marcial Maciel and Naasón García in Mexico, Fernando Karadima in Chile, and the leaders of the Sodalicio in Peru.

This monstrosity of religion is what matters most to analyze from a critical perspective in order to contribute to dismantling its power networks in society. It is urgent to do so through investigative journalism like that of Emiliano Ruiz Parra (Emiliano Ruiz Parra: HBO series, massive vehicle for the demystification of Marcial Maciel), of truth commissions such as the one proposed by then-candidate Borič in Chile (which, incidentally, was never implemented), to ensure accountability to society as an obligation of the secular state and, above all, to guarantee restorative justice for victims.

Ivan called these religious groups of today a parody of religion and, at the same time, another version of modernity that is collapsing in our times.

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Inspired by this fascinating conversation, I decided to share my thoughts at the book launch at the event organized by the UAEM School of Psychology, in conjunction with the Jean Robert and Sylvia Marcos Double Legacy Chair. I summarize what I presented at that discussion.

The first thing was to underline the importance of approaching the book as a theological provocation from our Latin American and Caribbean context, so that it is possible to make a critical reading of the European authors of the book, closely following their argumentation and highlighting other intercultural perspectives of approaching the mysterion of the real that religions call God.

Then, it is worth remembering that the meaning of Christ for humanity in times of civilizational collapse that we are experiencing today seems an irrelevant issue in the face of the exponential increase in violence under a new figure that some call, following René Girard, the "escalation to the extremes of the annihilation of the other." It does not seem relevant to discuss a religious figure who was trapped by a religion that domesticated his universal love. It seems even less important to get lost in the debate between a Slovenian philosopher and a British theologian when we find ourselves in the midst of the desolation of wars of genocide in Gaza, of extermination in Congo and South Sudan, of forced disappearances in Mexico, where the urgent thing is to stop the spiral of hatred if we wish to speak of the ethos political and spiritual possible for humanity in this uncertain hour.

And it is precisely here that the question of the experience of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century CE, facing hatred in his own body, may be relevant to us today.

Academic debates often stray into the realm of ideas, no matter how grounded they may be. Defending or accusing Hegel of various solutions to the dialectic of history to justify theological materialism, as Žižek does, or promoting Milbank's radical orthodoxy as a guardian of the City of God, seem secondary when it comes to confronting another monstrosity, one that has many heads, like the one of hatred and death produced by the capitalist, patriarchal, and white, Western hegemonic hydra.

Even defending or accusing Meister Eckhart - or better yet the former Dominican friar Rainer Schürmann (The Principle of Anarchy: Heidegger and the Question of Action), one of its modern interpreters, often cited by Žižek, for his interpretation of the negativity of divine being as the antecedent of the moment of negativity of the Hegelian dialectic seems like straw when the priority is to think about the negativity of those who inhabit “the region of non-being,” as Fanon said, and are being reduced to nothing.

I then proposed a decolonial approach to the book The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or DialecticA scholarly book that will generate much ink in the academic world, whether to validate Žižek's theological agnosticism or to confirm Milbank's theological philosophy. The crucial question the book poses lies in the impasse of reason in the face of the mystery of being. However, what is worth exploring is a different ontological approach, one that conceives of "being that ages and dies," as Levinas said.

To do so, it is necessary to turn to the Bible as the original source of this understanding of the paradox of being, and then to apophatic philosophy to spell out the intelligibility of the absurd when Christianity announces a "crucified Messiah" as the meaning of history. Following this route, it will be possible to cross the abyss to think about the monstrosity of being, but as the radiance of the messianic moment in which history seems to open like a recess of "hope against all hope" through "the wounds that heal."

Thus, another way of speaking about the critical link between philosophy, theology and politics emerges, not as an idea or as potestas politics, but as a messianic knot, that is, resistance to violence woven by those who live in “the shadows of the shadows of the shadows.”

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"By his wounds we shall be healed," says the oxymoron from the book of Isaiah (53:5), written by a disciple of the prophet during his people's exile in Babylon. This is perhaps the pinnacle of Old Testament revelation and one of the most radical truths about the human condition, politics, and hope. It is in this light, of course, that the torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman authorities, in complicity with the authorities of the Temple of Jerusalem and the enraged mob, will be read centuries later.

Exile was a spiritual and theological place for the disciple of the prophet, as it was for John the Baptist and so many prophets throughout history, "whose voice cries in the wilderness" (John 1:23). Until we reach the voice of Munther Isaac in the 2021 Christmas sermon in Bethlehem, Palestine. The Babylonian exile signified a contradiction for the expatriated people: on the one hand, the pain of being torn from their homeland; on the other, the recognition that they have only been able to live off the crumbs of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king. And yet, in the four poems preserved in the Book of Isaiah, the true source of life will be the disciple-people. Babylonian power crushed Davidic power. But the people survived by virtue of their fidelity to the first covenant, if not all, at least a few. Tzadikkim or just people in history. And so, that suffering people is the source of "another way of being," beyond the essence of Babylonian power, in the power of those who resist. They are the servant of Yhwh.

Following this spark from the anonymous disciple of Isaiah, we can then reread the history of "the cursed of the earth," yesterday and today. In particular, the history of the Palestinian people, who, in the depths of their pain from the genocide they suffered, allow us all to heal from their wounds if we open our lives and actions to this cry. A slogan of the Global Sumud Flotilla says precisely this: "They wanted to erase Palestine, and now Palestine sails all the seas."

Faced with the monstrosity of the exile in Babylon, the Hebrew people of the anawin, from the poor of God, brings forth the beauty of Sumud or resistance to the catastrophe that has befallen them.

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What dialectic of history in the Hegelian reading recreated by Žižek governs history? That of opposites that annihilate each other in search of a supposed synthesis of Aufhebung or overcoming this rivalry that only prolongs the death throes of humanity with the triumph of the executioners.

Nor is the philosophy of the City of God, yearned for by John Milbank as a return to theocracy, overcoming the narrow limits of modern autonomy that became a nightmare, capable of crossing the abysmal line that separates privilege from desolation.

Are both authors in this fictitious dialogue right in raising the alternative between the dialectic of Holy Saturday that annihilates the weak in the Sheol and the paradox of Easter Sunday, which is announced as the triumph of the victims over the executioners?

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Neither paradox nor dialectic, but messianic contraction of the being that ages and dies.

Eckhart warned us about figures and idols (deitas) that replace the ineffable God (diuinitas). They can be religious or political idols. What is crucial in the life of the Spirit is, therefore, for the German Dominican, detachment (Gellasenheit) as a form of apophatic or negative, non-dialectical negation of the impersonations of Divinity.

Pseudo-Dionysius had previously explored this path of overcoming the ego, giving rise to the experience of the Mothers and Fathers of the desert in their confrontation with the demons before arriving at the contemplation of the mysterion of the living God.

Therefore, today, apophatic theology is a companion to the political theory of the commons, proposed by collectives and subjectivities located on the peripheries of the hegemonic world, but rooted in the world of the vital connection between the human, the cosmic, and the divine.

By listening to the outcry, indignation, and hope of today's most vulnerable, we can then access the apparent monstrosity of Christ, which then becomes the beauty of the forgotten who re-exist when they say enough to the violence of the imperial being that kills.

Puebla, September 14, 2025

September 14, 2025
Kite designed by Francisco Toledo on handmade paper from Vista Hermosa Art Paper

Lay holiness?

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This weekend two young Roman Catholics will be canonized by Pope Leo XIV (Canonization of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati). Pier Giorgio Frassatti, an Italian Dominican layman who lived in the first quarter of the 20th century. The other, Carlo Acutis, the so-called “first millennial saint.” Each reveals not only l'air du temps of each century, but rather raise the question of the model of Church that we urgently need to present in our times of global catastrophe.

Since the end of the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Europe, has sought to listen to the working class and maintain contact with the population produced by the Industrial Revolution. The social teaching of the papal magisterium—since Pope Leo XIII and his Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum until the current pontiff Leo XIV, who chose his name for that reason, displayed an urban pastoral approach typical of the time to walk with that suffering sector of the people of God.

Catholic Action would be a lay response, supported by groups of bishops in countries such as Belgium and France, to such challenges. The worker priests (Worker Priests: The Church's Commitment to the Working World) were another praiseworthy page in this history, where it is worth remembering the accompaniment of the Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu and the subsequent infamous suppression of the movement by Pope Pius XII. The influence of Catholic Action would reach Latin America with its see-judge-act methodology, later inspiring liberation theology in Peru, Brazil and other countries in the region, as Agenor Brighenti has carefully studied in recent years (The ver-julgar-agir method).

One hundred years ago, a young Dominican layman from Piedmont (Pier Giorgio Frassati OP), close to the miners in his land and a mountaineer by passion, was the fruit of that ecclesial sensitivity of the time that would bear fruit in later decades in pastoral experiences in the rest of Europe and Latin America, with the pastoral movements of insertion in popular environments, especially the working world and indigenous peoples. Son of a famous journalist who was the owner of The StampPier Giorgio Frassati used to combine his political activism in the Italian Popular Party with readings of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, accompanied by climbs in the Alps with a club of friends and days of Eucharistic adoration in which he unfolded his interior life. A figure of his time, Pier Giorgio is today claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as a youthful lay saint, whose life ended abruptly at the age of 24 due to fulminant poliomyelitis probably contracted through his apostolate to the poor of Turin, leaving a spiritual imprint on the pastoral youth movements of a century ago.

The other young lay saint is Carlo Acutis, an Italian born in London, devoted to the Eucharist and very active on social media. He lived as a teenager focused on spreading the word about Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. After his death from leukemia at the age of fifteen, he became a symbol for today's "Catholic influencers," but with a more devotional tone than the social and political one like his fellow canonizer. A few months ago, I received Carlo's relics along with the youth ministry group of the Parish of Santa Rosa de Lima in Mexico City, founded by the Dominican friars almost a hundred years ago. This was an initiative of the Archdiocese of Mexico to commemorate the Jubilee of Youth (A faith that never ages: Rome, 25 years after the Jubilee of Youth with John Paul II) convened by Pope Francis and carried out by Pope Leo XIV. I was struck by the low attendance of young people from this hipster area of the city, with the presence of some devout young people with very pious traits and little social sensitivity. The rosary prayer prepared by the local youth group in the tradition of Dominican spirituality meditated on the sorrowful mysteries of Christ's passion, associating them with the cry of today's youth in this neighborhood of Mexico City: gentrification, insecurity, violence against women, unemployment, and drug abuse as wounds of Christ's body today. It was an attempt to connect the tradition of the rosary with the lives of people today. The small community of older adults gathered there prayed in amazement, following the lead of the young people, and then returned to their traditional devotions, meditating on Christ's life in his passion and death. At the end, a few young people from other parishes gave a brief workshop on the millennial saint, urging the use of social media as a new place to proclaim Christ and promote the adoration of the Eucharist in communities, along with the values of the Gospel.

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I had already encountered this new generation of young traditionalist Catholics in Europe and the United States, among lay people, Dominicans, and Jesuits, among the religious orders and congregations recognized as promoters of the conciliar renewal of Vatican II. Their interests seem retrograde to me at first, although later I try to get closer to those generations and discover in them an inner beauty, mixed with naiveté and fear of getting lost in the labyrinth of pluralism. They seek identities that give them certainty. Religiously, they love the ancient Latin culture of medieval Christianity, above all, less so that of the Greek patristic era. They are enraptured by Gregorian chant and the Summa of Theology of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval masters, but without understanding their method open to conversation with pagan philosophers, nor following scholastic logical thought. They are fascinated by conspicuous signs of belief, such as the religious habit, the liturgical veil, and receiving communion by kneeling with great devotion, but clumsily because they do so as if they were newborn giraffes.

Despite their intense devotion, they are indifferent to social issues as a spiritual and theological context. Talking about Gaza in a sermon seems like ideology to them. Not to mention inviting unmarried couples to the Eucharistic table, much less welcoming the community of sexual diversity at Mass. They deem such practices a deviation from Church doctrine. These younger generations of Catholic laypeople seek to return to the doctrinal Church, like that of the Council of Trent and Vatican I, without fully understanding the meaning of the conciliar spirit that inspired Pope Benedict XVI to convene Vatican II.

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And I wonder then what models of Church are urgently needed today for a laboratory city like Mexico City and so many others around the world. It's about responding to a range of youth identities where it's a challenge to create spaces to invite them to look at one another, almost impossible to welcome them in a single liturgical celebration. I remember that my generation still dreamed of "taking Paradise by storm" through a commitment to justice and peace, with universal human rights as a sign of the new times. This led us to a university ministry at the CUC in the 1980s focused on a liberating Church.

Something that seems outdated in this era of deglobalization and the expansion of war ministries, military drone invasions, and the cynicism of capitalism in its expansionist phase of obscene forced colonization. The perverse use of religion, as we see today in Palestine with the Israeli government and its allies around the world justifying their genocidal actions in the Bible, seems to leave young Catholics today indifferent, absent from the protests in the streets and squares of the world against this manipulation of faith.

What secular saints does humanity need today amidst the ruins of our civilization? Frassati or Acutis. The young mountaineer close to the miners or the saint. millennial of Eucharistic adoration as a “highway to heaven.”

I think neither one nor the other, because both were children of their time. Today I see a new generation of young people passionate about Christ as Messiah and universal brother, whom they recognize for his exceptional inclusive love of the just and sinners that arises from their intimate experience of communion with his AbbaYoung people who are simultaneously touched by the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Tich Nath Han, or by the Zen meditation masters they have encountered at retreats in diverse spiritual traditions.

Young lay people who live holiness in their eroticized and loving bodies, unafraid to explore different modes of femininity and masculinity, of biological or adoptive fatherhood and motherhood, wrapped in the love of Christ and passionate about serving his wounded body.

Millennials who are not tasteless influencers who reproduce on social media the same things they heard in their parish groups, but who invent "blessed blends" of narrative theologies close to the discarded, crossing the peripheries, weaving bonds of life, empathy and political-spiritual solidarity. Lay holiness as the new generation of young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Latin America and the Caribbean (Blessed Mixture. Narrative Theology of Our America) that reinvents that old method of see-judge-act with a narrative theology on the peripheries of society, with compassionate imagination, following in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth and his messianic community.

Perhaps today, as daughters and sons of uncertain times, lay holiness is experiencing a collapse of religious institutions and the invention of other ways of worshipping the loving presence of Divinity, not only in the temple, but also in the community that, animated by its faith, seeks to save a polluted river or a dying lake. Youth communities climb the volcanoes of Mesoamerica or the Andean mountain range, with its endangered glaciers, as paths to ecological spirituality.

Initiatives that seek to worship Christ in his wounded body today.

Lay holiness which, after all, is the life of the Ruah divine who makes all things new from the rubble of the crumbling world.

Mexico City, September 6, 2025

September 6, 2025

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