Category: Hope

Antún Kojtom Lam | Ch'ulel Mural | City Theater, San Cristóbal de Las Casas 2012 | Photo: Carlos Mendoza

Weaving a political theology for times of Great Catastrophe Some progress on the collective book currently being published in New York

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The renowned Canadian author Naomi Klein, along with Astra Taylor, has just published a provocative book on end-time fascism. In the introduction alone—the book is predicted to be a bestseller in the English-speaking world—the authors realistically lay out, with journalistic flair, the threads of fascism as an expression of minority capitalism trapped in its own contradiction: on the one hand, driven by ever-increasing wealth, and on the other, threatened by majorities staging protests in the streets in increasingly prevalent dystopian scenarios.

My friend Pablo Reyna sent me the book from Colombia with a brief message that I read as a provocation to engage with the authors in an alternative reading of the underlying theological framework, which, in my view, lies in the mobilizing role of spiritualities of resistance. Certainly, these thinkers see in the return to place, or "hereness," the key to recovering the vision of a humanity that cares for life in the here and now, contrary to the hegemonic narrative. From what I can see so far, however, they haven't yet explored the vast current of decolonial practices and thought from the epistemic South that we have been describing in our work for several years.

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Such is the central theme of the book that is currently in the editorial process at the prestigious publishing house Orbis Books in New York, which, for six decades, has presented the foundational works of liberation theology to the English-speaking public, publishing its main authors such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, Leonardo Boff and their creative readers in the American context and in other latitudes such as South Africa, Korea and Palestine.

This is a collaborative work, the fruit of the colloquia I organized over five years at Boston College, under the auspices of the "Beyond Global Violence" initiative, which I proposed as a platform for my personal research in my capacity as a senior professor at that institution. From there, I was able to invite colleagues from Brazil, Mexico, England, Spain, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the United States to participate in various discussions on emerging social, philosophical, and theological thought following the collapse of the modern dream. In my previous research conducted in Mexico, Switzerland, France, and Brazil, I had been connecting the analysis of late modern phenomenology with René Girard's mimetic theory to explore subjectivity collapsed by the dream of the technoscientific ego. But it was missing the decolonial analysis inspired by Frantz Fanon and Aníbal Quijano that continued the path of Latin American liberation thought, incorporating new theoretical and practical categories to think about “coloniality” as a modern process of five centuries of extractivism of the labor, knowledge and ways of life of the subjugated peoples.

Thus arose the question of the supplanting of the divine promoted by modernity through the deification of reason, technology, the market, patriarchy, and the will to power, to mention only a few of the control mechanisms implemented by Western technoscientific rationality. Hence the need to postulate the "apophatic wellspring" of the political, appealing to "nothingness" as that which we have in common, in Matthew Kruger's apt expression, in the "here and now" of our identities of social class, race, gender, religion, and culture.

In this way, thanks to these conversations, we were able to access the wellspring of resistance and re-existence where decolonial political theology flows for times of great catastrophe. This gave rise to the idea of a collective book that would gather the intuitions and narratives we explored over five years in Massachusetts.

When I told Neto Valiente, my dear Salvadoran colleague at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, about the emerging decolonial political theology—going further than the first-generation liberation theology he admires and knows so well—the one that arises from the intersection of phenomenology, mimetic theory, apophatic philosophy, and decolonial thought, he looked at me incredulously. He asked, “And who has written about that?” I simply replied, “No one has until now, but we will.”.

Laurel, Sole, Matthew, Valentina, Maddie, Francis, Juan Miguel, Martín, and Amirah—among many other master's and doctoral students—who were following my postgraduate courses on liberation, decolonial, and queer theologies at Boston College, witnessed how these seemingly disparate threads were woven into a discursive loom with the plot of vulnerability-conviviality-combative hope as a rereading of the coloniality of power-knowledge-being that we analyzed in class and deepened during gatherings at Mingo and Valentina's house with the splendid Chilean hospitality, where commensality made ideas and friendship flow better.

The colleagues I invited to each colloquium on one of the theoretical sources I mentioned above readily agreed to participate, but when I spoke to them about the correlation between these approaches, many expressed skepticism, while others nodded with curiosity. And that's how the book I proposed to the New York publisher came about, after one of its editors invited me to publish some of my work during a talk at the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) convention in Baltimore in June 2024. I told him I had a better idea: to propose a collaborative manuscript on political theology in times of global uncertainty. He curiously accepted the proposal I sent him, after consulting with the colleagues who had participated in the Boston colloquia to see if they would be willing to commit to writing what we had shared in person.

At that moment, we were entering the Great Catastrophe in which we find ourselves trapped today. Thus, the collective work would take shape as a collective narrative of hope amidst the rubble of the genocide in Gaza, the clandestine graves of Mexico, the fissures of the Palestinian and Afro-Brazilian diasporas, and the detention centers for undocumented immigrants in the United States, among other non-places where, paradoxically, “the political” emerges as resistance to necropower.

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The book is titled “Power and Potency,” a commentary on the important work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “Power and Glory,” where he discusses the supplanting of the divine (Glory) by modern economics and politics (power). We want to approach divine Glory, always ineffable and unmanipulable, from the peripheries of the hegemonic world, specifically, from the “potency” of the poor and excluded, as Jean Robert and Majid Rahmena pointed out, or of “the wretched of the earth,” in the words of Frantz Fanon.

The subtitle “Political Theology in Times of Great Catastrophe” reveals the main thesis running through each chapter: that it is possible to experience and think about hope by living “the political” from its reverse side and with eschatological imagination, in its messianic source and amidst the ruins of the Nakba, as the Palestinian people do today. But now it is necessary to do so on the global scale of Great Catastrophe, as the Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres proposes in his reflections in this book. The Zapatistas in southeastern Mexico call their way of living and thinking about the political “the commons,” thus recovering their ancestral Mayan tradition of territory, which, in addition to communal lands, belongs to no one privately, but rather to the community.

The book's four sections are presented in the Introduction, which I have written. They explain the intersection of two axes: the phenomenological-anthropological and the decolonial-apophatic. The first section begins with the reflections of Viola Raheb, a Palestinian philosopher of the diaspora, amidst a decolonial political theology approach proposed by Nicolás Panotto from Chile and Argentina, analyzing evangelical Zionism as a mechanism of the coloniality of power. The second section weaves together the anthropological thread, starting with mimetic theory applied to the sacrificial context of Israeli militarism by Silvana Rabinovich, and its effects in the Trump era, analyzed with keen insight by James Alison to trace the possibility of “catholicity” in times of catastrophe; with a mystical chapter by Brian Robinette seeking the essence of “life hidden in God” amidst the extreme polarization of contemporary societies such as the United States.

The third section is a polyphony of decolonial voices from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Martinique, and Brazil. Nelson Maldonado-Torres opens with an invitation to consider the coloniality of technofascism as a Great Catastrophe, with Palestine as its epicenter; Donovan Hernández, from Mexico, proposes a “critique of the reason for war” as a leitmotif of coloniality; Andrew Prevot, a young African American theologian of the new generation, recovers the work of the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant as a provocation for thinking about the political; Cleusa Caldeira deepens her proposal of “theoquilombism” as a decolonization of thought and praxis that arises from Afro-diasporic subjectivities in Brazil; Aída Hernández, who invited her colleague Gabriela Juárez as a co-author, proposes a reading of the political from the perspective of accompanying the Searching Mothers in Mexico to explore an embodied spirituality amidst clandestine graves; And finally, Ángel Méndez-Montoya, Mexican “queer” choreographer and theologian, reflects on the queer table as a theological provocation to think about the political as “the common” that arises from the subjectivities of sex-gender dissidences.

And to open critical thinking to its pre-linguistic roots, the fourth section explores the wellspring of life and thought. Raquel Bouso, from Barcelona, recounts the philosophy of nothingness from Meister Eckhart to the Kyoto School, with its implications for thinking about the political. And Matthew Kruger, a young American thinker, delves into the abyssal thought of Nothingness as a wellspring of the political that warns us against ancient and new idolatries in political contexts that manipulate divinity as identity ideologies.

The prologue by Mark Lewis Taylor, renowned professor emeritus at Princeton, announces the urgent deconstruction of the violent sacred in times of Nakba, based on the reflections of the poet Darwish and the Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe, to confront the poetics of despair based on diverse resistances, such as the Palestinian Sumud.

And the Epilogue by M. Shawn Copeland, professor emerita of Boston College and renowned author of black feminist theology in the United States, calls us to “the praxis of humanity” to live amidst the rubble with hope.

The book is scheduled for release in February 2027, but it is already available for pre-order on the portal of Orbis Books. Later I will tell you about the virtual and in-person presentations that we will be organizing, together with my fellow editors and authors, of this great collective volume that wants to contribute, in a collegial and critical way, to thinking about possible hope in times of civilizational collapse.

Jobel, September 19, 2026

September 19, 2026
Paulo Medina | Cosmos | Chihuahua, 2020

Mutual accompaniment as a path of decolonial spirituality Explorations from the "here and now" of religion

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The spring that nourishes the valley of re-existences is, without a doubt, spirituality or that inner strength that arises from shared vulnerability to resist and re-exist.

When a victim of any kind of violence simply freezes, licking their wounds, they risk becoming trapped in their pain, with little chance of healing the trauma and loss, and without the possibility of grieving. But when they allow themselves to be touched by the wounds of another person or group, they begin to realize that their pain and anger connect them to others. And from there, paradoxically, emerges a power to discover themselves, alongside others, no longer isolated, but capable of confronting the trauma and creating new ways of life that will allow them to exist again.

That is why the Searching Mothers in Mexico represent an ethical, political, and spiritual compass in this uncertain time for the world, helping us keep hope alive. Mutual care emerges here as a way of inhabiting, with others, the cracks in the narratives imposed by the oppressors, whether they be mafiosos or well-meaning people who wield toxic power that stifles life. It is about, day by day, experiencing in solitude the pain that no one can truly feel except in their own flesh, but with hope when one opens oneself to the pain of other people and families, while simultaneously exploring new territories to inhabit with "others," against the grain of the hegemonic narrative, wherever we may find ourselves.

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I discovered this wellspring of spirituality through mutual accompaniment with my Peruvian friend Juan Carlos La Puente more than twenty years ago in Santiago, Chile, during a period of community study with lay people, friars and sisters of the Dominican family, students, and advisors, sharing a roof, food, prayer, and leisure time together. We sought to go beyond the traditional frameworks of spirituality, especially in the case of Christianity and the centuries-old religious orders that had given way to a vertical style of “spiritual authority,” with a certain modern Jesuit influence, leading to the exercise of control over people's lives and consciences. Due to family tradition and as a young friar, I never had that experience, but my friend did, which allowed him to realize that this path was not the one that helped him flow in the life of the Divine Spirit. Juan Carlos longed to explore, like a condor of his land, that flapping that teaches us to "be moved and let ourselves be moved," as he recounts in the book "Mutual accompaniment in the divine Ruah" that we published together, during the Covid19 pandemic, in 2022.

A few years earlier, in 2016, we had the opportunity to drink from the same well in San Juan, Puerto Rico, along with two young Lutheran pastors, Melisa and Ron, who, with the support of David, their bishop in Portland, Oregon, were seeking to connect their Protestant spirituality of "sola fides" or "faith alone saves"—which had borne so much fruit over recent centuries—with the liberation and decolonial theologies emerging in the Global South. Months after that encounter, we met in a cabin in Oregon, the Green State of the United States, a group of about fifteen people, mostly young Lutheran pastors like Tayler, Lauren (now a bishop), Erika, and others, along with Saúl, Héctor, and me—three Mexicans who were then, though unknowingly, walking from our own vulnerability—David, a Lutheran bishop, and a "wounded Catholic," as Juan Carlos already described himself at that time. In Portland, he collaborated with migrant collectives, homeless people, and Latinx artists who, through their aesthetic work, accompanied the paths of dignity for these people and communities in resistance.

Thus, we began exploring a path of “mutual spiritual and theological accompaniment” that, since then, has brought together sixty or more people each year, eager to explore this “alternative” path of embodied and diverse spirituality, often outside the religious institutions that arose from this search but which, over time, became lost in the minutiae of controlling bodies and minds, and “hijacked spirituality,” as Carmenmargarita Sánchez de León likes to say, in the straitjacket of a belief system. We thus discovered the power of decolonial spirituality that emerges on the margins of the hegemonic system. This mutual accompaniment takes place through virtual and in-person meetings: five monthly online sessions, where we begin with personal accounts of our own vulnerability, precisely where we learn to “awaken,” with intuitions of life, dignity, rebellion, and resistance. We read each other's stories to find common threads and differences, which intertwine into a multicolored tapestry that adorns the table in our little house. There, a chef helps us cook together these shared narratives, built with words, symbols, and rituals that each of us creates, sometimes in the intimacy of our own homes, and sometimes together. At the end of each year, we gather for a virtual retreat "in the cloud," where we share with friends from other little houses the beautiful plants and delicious fruits we have sown and harvested "together." To conclude the year, those who are able to meet in person travel to a territory where a fellow member lives with their community of belonging and resistance. There, we celebrate our liberating intuitions, sharing the paths that have led us there, and celebrating in community with symbols and rituals what we see the Ruah (Spirit) moving us to experience.

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This experience of more than a decade of exploration gives us clues in diverse contexts - from the working-class neighborhoods of Arequipa and Nairobi, between lands of resistance in Catalonia and Chiapas, through homes of re-existence in Kerala and Portland, connecting artists with social activists, Lutheran pastors and Roman Catholic laypeople or freethinkers, all seeking inner life beyond religions - where we cultivate mutual support to give each other strength on the exciting path of re-existing amidst the growing violence of this world.

There, the other stream that feeds the valley of resistance and re-existence is born. The Resiste and Re-existe gatherings, which also emerged more than a decade ago at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where I spent twenty years, were inspired by the vision of figures like Gustavo Esteva, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, David Fernández, and Pablo Reyna. This path was illuminated by the proven wisdom of Raúl Zibechi, Rita Segato, Aída Hernández, Lorena Cabnal, Daniela Rea, and so many other "wise" individuals, situated in the cracks of global and local necropower, to tell and think about "other possible worlds | where many worlds fit," as we connect the dreams of the World Social Forum and the Zapatista movement in the mountains and jungles of southeastern Mexico.

But it must be said that the “collective awakening” came, with the force of a tide of life, from the social movements that envision and work, day after day, on the “change of world” that we all long for.

But that's another story that awaits us next week.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, September 6, 2026

September 6, 2026
Denilson Baniwa | Curumim, keeper of memories | Brazil, 2018

My blog's first birthday

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

One of the facets of the “deprofessionalized intellectual,” to use that expression beloved by Gustavo Esteva, after thirty years of academic life in my case, has consisted of exploring the territory of the blog. Discovering this inhospitable land has proven to be quite a challenge for a citizen of the so-called Generation of the Baby boomers or the post-war period.

This digital adventure has been a challenge for someone who comes from the digital prehistory. I was a child of the 1960s who grew up playing with Towi, small wooden pieces to build houses or animals, imagining stories of cowboys and Indians. My childhood was filled with racing games with tiny metal toy cars, the size of my palm, launched with precise flicks of my index finger to propel them along the edge of the cement sidewalk, circling the block of our house, located in the beautiful San Francisco neighborhood of Puebla. We would cover a perimeter of about a hundred meters, spending long hours with cousins and neighbors. Then came Meccano sets, building machines and bridges with metal pieces full of holes held together with screws. These moments alternated with races of go-karts, speeding down the sloping streets. No video game left its mark on my generation.

For schoolwork, the typewriter was our irreplaceable ally in middle and high school for submitting final projects. We would make carbon copies of our work on sheets of colored tissue paper, depending on the subject. Making a typing mistake was a real tragedy because we had to retype the entire page.

Years later, when I wrote my doctoral thesis in Freiburg, I was finally able to use an electric typewriter with a built-in proofreader, which seemed like a quantum leap compared to the mechanical Olivetti typewriters of my childhood and adolescence. But even then, when the rigorous thesis supervisor commented on the typed pages, submitted after many sleepless days and nights, the entire chapter had to be rewritten. The magic of the copy-paste of word processors that now save us hours and days of work with a single click.

Despite the great advantages of today's digital world, I now recall with nostalgia that heroism of academic writing from my childhood and youth, which tested us in the art of patience when writing, correcting, and preparing academic work carefully, at a pace of trial and error, in a parsimony that favored reflection and, sometimes, led us to collective hysteria.

The final binding of the typed work was the master touch that, for students with good financial resources, was done with ostentation by using the new thermal binding technology, finer and more elegant, to impress the professor.

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Suddenly, without realizing the qualitative leap into the digital world, I've been thrust into another inhospitable territory called Artificial Intelligence. A few years ago, some journalists and scientists were talking about the "Internet of Things," which seemed like a Gothic oracle brought into the digital world. All the technological devices designed with semiconductors and microchips were connected in a secret network in some digital cloud that seemed to float above our heads. That cloud perhaps represented something similar to what grandmothers imagined when they prayed to angelic choirs to protect us from heaven. The difference is that now that cloud is a threat because it stores our data in some center controlled by Google or Palantir, devastating the land and its population, but above all, leaving us unprotected against the global surveillance that terrified Pope Leo XIV.

In the world of philosophy, I recall that, at the beginning of the new millennium, Mariano Corbì, a Catalan Jesuit who did not like to be identified as a companion of Ignatius, spoke of “digital reason” as an alternative to “analog reason” that had dominated the West for thousands of years, predicting an ontological leap in cosmic and human relations that would have an immediate impact on a new way of living spirituality as “religion without religion”.

For his part, Ivan Illich, in his brilliant work "In the Vineyard of the Text," published in 1993, explored the birth of the West in terms of the technology of meaning production from the medieval book, following his great Parisian master, Hugh of Saint Victor, in his work "Didascalicon," as a metaphor for the argument that unfolds like a vineyard from the leaves of the text with its numerous glosses. Based on this intelligence of the text, Illich characterized the systems era that humanity entered with the digital technology of the end of the last millennium as a dangerous threshold of dehumanization.

But now artificial intelligence is growing and is here to stay as a data and communication control environment that, in its generative form, threatens to make decisions on its own, cross-referencing data and drawing conclusions, to inform decisions in the companies, governments, and militaries that depend on it to achieve the ultimate efficiency (if you'll pardon the expression) of their commercial and military objectives. We have much to learn, evaluate, and decide so that this new technology doesn't end up devouring us as a human species.

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A year ago, on June 1, 2025, I launched my blog as a virtual pathway to weave conversations with people and communities with whom I share friendship, aspirations, ideas, and ongoing initiatives to cultivate a more humane world in our own territories. The digital world now allows me to continue this dialogue with people from the Global South and North, with whom I have crossed paths at some point in my personal, academic, and pastoral life, from Mapuche and Dakota territories to South Africa, from Boston to Chiapas, from Pomerania to El Salvador, Brazil, and Peru.

With the support of Raquel, Sergio, and Fatima, talented colleagues from the Afink workshop and advisors in graphic and digital communication, as well as the critical eye of Eduardo Velasco as the portal's image advisor, I have been proposing a short text each week on current topics, with an emphasis on the human background, thought, spirituality, and social commitment to tell and weave stories of dignity and hope.

Reaching the milestone of a first year of weekly publications allows me to revisit the topics discussed—always accompanied by a decolonial art image or a photograph of my own taking from my travels—to express my gratitude for this collective learning, trusting that the conversation will continue so that we can mutually enrich each other with true words.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, June 29, 2026

June 29, 2026

English