Category: Intercultural spirituality

Rebeca Morimoto Hishikawa | Digital Illustration | Lima, 2021

Vulnerabilis Humanitas On the glimmers in the cracks of being

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Last Thursday, the JobeLab collective —formed by friends and colleagues from the city to promote open conversations about issues that matter to the quality of life of diverse communities— brought us together at the La Madriguera bookstore, in the Guadalupe neighborhood of the city of Jobel, the indigenous name of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The topic brought together nearly fifty people from diverse generations, backgrounds, and interests, drawn from the world of social activism, academia, the Church, and the arts. The pretext was to propose various interpretations of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas," published on May 15th, the centenary of his predecessor Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum," or "On New Things," written when the Roman Catholic Church was grappling with the challenges of industrialization.

The fundamental question, however, was not merely technical or pastoral: it was a question about the very soul of our time. How can we safeguard the magnificence and vulnerability of humanity when machines promise efficiency, calculation, and memory without wounds? How can we recognize, amidst the digital dazzle, that our greatness lies not in becoming invulnerable, but in learning to inhabit fragility (vulnerabilis humanitas) as a place of encounter, discernment, and human-divine communion?

Today, digitalization has brought about an unprecedented cultural transformation. Data, algorithms, and prompts —those instructive teachers designed on databases— exert an omnipresent influence through our cell phones, tablets and computers that, as Abraham Mena commented, are applied with increasing sophistication to all spheres of social life: the economy, science, technology, the arts, sexuality, education and religion.

It is a “machine” that is not intelligent, argued Kathia Loyzaga, but one whose mechanisms we must learn to understand and manage: exploring its possibilities, recognizing its limitations, and always maintaining, as Leo XIV emphasized, the primacy of the human, with its creativity and unique talents as the image of God. This irreplaceable core is the human heart, which João Almeida reminded us is the center of the religious message of Christianity and other spiritual traditions of humanity. This reality of being in relation to others is part of our path to humanization and liberation, as Paulo Freire observed.

In addition to recognizing the opportunities that AI offers for the development of science and technology, with an immediate impact on our lives, we must also consider the risks posed by the misuse of this technology when it falls into the hands of governments, militaries, and transnational corporations that profit from machine learning for their own benefit.

When addressing the ethical dimension of AI, the topic I was assigned to discuss in the talk, I wanted to recall Ivan Illich's warning about the age of systems: a time when humans have become replaceable subsystems, at any moment, by robots and algorithmic decisions under the command of a "handful of oligarchs," as Pope Leo said on his recent trip to Cameroon, referring to the masters of Silicon Valley.

Magnificent and vulnerable humanity before the warlords

Pope Leo XIV's theoretical framework allows him to move with ease within a vision of the human person as a relational being, exploring the intricacies of subjectivity masterfully narrated by Saint Augustine sixteen hundred years ago in his theological works and in his monastic rule of life. From this perspective, Leo XIV speaks of the Intimacy of Humanity to praise "magnificent humanity," which has received from God the indelible mark of his love, while at the same time recognizing the limits it cannot transgress under penalty of becoming a source of moral chaos. Leo therefore emphasizes that, while humanity is "magnificent" because it is the image of divinity, it is also "vulnerable" because it is a finite creature: a subjectivity that explores its limits, recognizes them, and discovers them as a place of encounter with others, with the cosmos, and with God.

Some voices within the global theological community propose continuing to critically examine how to approach AI, while still acknowledging its potential benefits for humanity and the planet. One provocative voice is that of Paolo Gamberini, an Italian Jesuit philosopher, who envisions a papal encyclical on this topic within the theoretical framework of Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic Christ, the great 20th-century scientist and mystic. In his cosmology, humanity appears intimately linked to the evolution of species and the cosmos from the Christic Alpha, including new creatures—such as AI—all assumed by Divine Wisdom in the movement toward the Omega, where the total Christ will be all in all.

The discussion yielded diverse perspectives. For example, a young sculptor distanced himself from AI because, in his view, it cannot replace the human genius of artistic creation. Another voice came from a leader defending the Jobel wetlands, a land of reeds and waterways now threatened by real estate development, urban chaos, and the apathy of a population that pollutes its waterways with garbage, while the municipal government proves incapable of regulating the urban disorder. How can AI be a useful tool for urban planning that doesn't displace residents as active participants in caring for Mother Earth?

New discussions about AI are being organized in various forums: in schools throughout the city and in communities in Zinacantán, the neighboring city, where younger generations live with AI daily and often use it naively or indiscriminately. The goal is to generate collective reflection on how to "disarm" AI of its serious risks and dangers, and how to "recover the human element" in this new digital age for Indigenous peoples, mestizo communities, and multicultural cities. This is a shared task that urges us to promote the dignity of all human beings, along with the species with which we share this "place," where life flourishes in diverse ways, in new and surprising forms of "the vernacular"—that connection to the land so dear to Illich as a place of conviviality because only there do we flourish as individuals and as a human species in harmony with the vital environment that sustains us.

But the recovery of our humanity isn't decreed from a room, nor is it exhausted by the analysis of an encyclical. It needs to be embodied in connections, territories, shared memories, and small fires that withstand the wind. That's why, upon leaving the discussion, the question of AI began to resonate with other names: wetland, volcano, cabin, breath, community. There, in those cracks where life persists, resisting so much violence, reflection became a path to learning how to be different.

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In honor of Ivan Illich's legacy, and as part of the numerous events commemorating the centenary of his death, the JobeLab collective is organizing the presentation of the book "Hosting the World: Thinking with Ivan Illich Under One Common Roof" by Elías González and Carlos Tornel, next Saturday, July 18th, at 5 pm, at Belil Restaurant in our city. The authors will be present, and Irene Ragzzini, Fabio Ceballos, and I will offer commentary. It will undoubtedly be an opportunity to share valuable insights and reflect together on our local context.

From the algorithm to the campfire: the triangle-volcano and the magma

After my trip to the land of the volcanoes in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, which I recounted here last week, the echoes of my story resonated as far as Kerala, India, where Kochurani Abraham, a beloved feminist theologian, wrote to me with emotion about that shared yearning for a “Cosmic Home” where countless micro-planets and mini-stars can be lovingly cared for with the radiance of the divine Ruah. A hut-home that illuminates the path, like straw beginning to burn in the hollow of a fire already prepared by its inhabitants, who fan the flames with their breath and with the help of a “tlatecuinaltiani,” or palm-leaf blower in Nahuatl.

Echoes of mutual support also arrived from Oregon, with Juan Carlos and Carolina dreaming of a shared “place” where we can meet for periods of time, open to the embodied spirituality of the ancestral Peruvian Quechua in communion with the ancestral Mexican Andean highlands. And from Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, Laurel sent reminiscences of her time in Puebla and its northern highlands when she was an exchange student: a journey that later led her to El Salvador to walk with the Basic Ecclesial Communities of that sister Central American country. Other echoes also arrived from Soweto, Wallmapu, and Dakota, from friends with whom I have shared memorable moments of spirituality rooted in diverse sacred lands, with vernacular thought and artistic creation that allow us to always celebrate life on the borders of death.

For three decades, I have been weaving networks of thought, activism, and spirituality within the cracks of hegemonic worlds, alongside colleagues and comrades from diverse collectives and communities in resistance, where we learn to be. From this emerged processes such as Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment, which brings together around a hundred people each year in virtual homes facilitated by a chef, culminating in an annual retreat, either virtual or in person, visiting territories of resistance. Also born along this path are the Resiste/Re-existe festival-gatherings, with dozens of social movements from the epistemic South engaging in dialogue with academics and artists to strengthen our diverse spiritualities, our mutual solidarity, and our developing decolonial thought. And as the third vertex of the triangle, thought itself: the intersection of postmodern phenomenology, mimetic theory, decolonial thought and apophatic philosophy, enriched with new approaches thanks to an exciting generation of colleagues such as Cleusa Caldeira and Pedro Igor Leite da Silva in Brazil, Laurel Potter in the United States and El Salvador, Juan Carlos La Puente in Oregon and Peru, Juan Jesús Vázquez in Mexico, and Soledad del Villar, Valentina Nilo and Martín Aguilera in Chile.

As a collective of decolonial philosophical and theological thought, we will meet in March of next year in Cholula, Puebla, as the ancestral homeland of the volcano-triangle, to share intuitions, findings, and proposals for thought and life, with the aim of continuing to walk with our communities of belonging by choice in the construction of other possible worlds, encouraged by the incandescent magma of the divine Ruah in the cracks of being.

Jobel, July 11, 2026

July 12, 2026
Jorge González Camarena | The Mountain | Encaustic on Masonite | BBVA Mexico Collection | ca. 1980

On the volcanic slopes of the Mexican plateau About life that endures and flourishes in the cracks of the world

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The fumarole of the Popocatépetl volcano is perceived from afar as a powerful sign of sacred land, venerated by the ancient Mexicans and later by the "graniceros" of today, who preserve the prayer with offerings to the ancestral mountains of the Cholula valley, heart of the volcanic axis of the Mexican highlands.

Returning to the landscape of childhood, scanning for signs to sow dreams of words and true encounters, brought to my memory surprising episodes of life.

The first was the campsite on the slopes of Iztaccíhuatl, or the Sleeping Woman, which we, the colleagues from the Emiliano Zapata Preparatory School, organized fifty years ago. The camaraderie of Raúl, Arturo, Adrián, Juan, and Alfredo, among other dear friends, forged a sacred friendship in that place that endures to this day. The youthful rituals of student camping were enlivened by periods of silence, games, cooking, and celebration, listening in the heart of the forest to the progressive rock music of our generation, from Pink Floyd and Queen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other British bands that populated our collective imagination.

Another memorable moment in volcanic lands was the ascent to the Popocatépetl crater, with Friar Raúl Vera as our novice master, guided by Güero, a young, expert mountaineer from Amecameca, in the State of Mexico, one early morning in the spring of 1980. After a great effort in the final part of the climb, well-equipped with ice axes, mountain boots, and goggles for the glare of the snow, the group of ten novices and their master reached the crater. We found the volcano's chimney exhaling sulfurous vapors, still silent, as Don Goyo—as Popocatépetl is called because of March 12, the day of Saint Gregory, on which, since ancient times, its feast day has been celebrated with offerings to ask for rain—would not reactivate its active cycle until December 21, 1994, after seventy years of volcanic inactivity. Peering towards the inner cone from the crater's ridge, amidst an astonishing silence, we celebrated "the Mass on the world," according to that phrase by Teilhard de Chardin, that remarkable scientist and Jesuit mystic of the cosmic Christ, Alpha and Omega of the evolution of the cosmos.

As a sacred place, this land of volcanoes has also suffered the siege of evil, but with the triumph of life, leaving scars on the wounded social body.

I remember the harrowing experience of four friars who volunteered to mediate, for humanitarian and evangelical reasons, the ransom payment for a kidnapping victim. It happened in 1994, that fateful year for Mexico, when disparate worlds collided like tectonic plates: the modernity of President Salinas, marked by the greed and corruption of the Mexican political system, clashed head-on with the guerrilla movements that still survived in the country after their persecution by the Mexican state since the Dirty War of the 1970s. Living through the experience of mediating the ransom payment for a kidnapped person was a profound experience, bringing me face to face with the fragility of human life in the face of the abyss of evil. The cursed money of that thirty-million-dollar ransom symbolized, on the one hand, the perversion of the powerful members of the Mexican elite who amassed such wealth, and on the other, the wickedness of those who used human life as a banner of justice for dubious social causes. As part of the ransom delivery route, the kidnappers, who were guiding us by satellite phones—very rare even then—made us cross the Paso de Cortés, right between the two sacred volcanoes, to reach Puebla and deliver the cursed briefcases there. This wasn't possible because, according to those manipulating us, we were being followed by the government. After a few days of uncertainty, we were able to deliver the ransom in a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, and the person was released hours later. The four friars who volunteered to be mediators will never forget that experience of humanitarian assistance amidst a wave of criminal violence, with perpetrators on both sides. Violence that, unfortunately, persists to this day in new forms of necropower.

Years later, I returned to that area through Tlamacas, a mountain refuge also located in Paso de Cortés, during a dramatic moment for a community there on a spiritual retreat led by Friar Ricardo Villarreal at the Hermitage of Silence. In the middle of the night, after a day of meditation, the community was attacked by bandits. Their collective trauma did not prevent this contemplative meditation community from continuing on its path of inner healing and strengthening of its communal life, uniting body, mind, and spirit in a journey of spirituality in motion, through sacred walks, Christian and Buddhist mantras, and service to the community. The silence of the forest, with its human and other inhabitants, had been desecrated by criminal gangs.

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In recent decades, the plume of Don Goyo (Goyo's volcano) has persisted, sometimes exhaling sulfurous vapors and volcanic ash accompanied by lava. Thus, it presides over the dawns of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley, with its history of earthquakes and social movements of indigenous peoples, of youth demanding democracy, and of collectives dedicated to the spirituality of the land.

Popocatépetl is the guardian of Iztaccíhuatl, also called "La Volcana" (The Volcano) by the farming communities that live on its slopes, or Rosita because its August festival gratefully celebrates the rains and the fertility of the crops. She is the beloved Sleeping Woman of Mexica mythology, reimagined in recent times as the guardian of the planet's chakras, according to the mythology of Regina created by Antonio Velasco Piña.

A few days ago, I had the good fortune to visit the territory of San Juan Tianguismanalco and Santiago Xalitzintla, accompanied by Víctor and Carolina, with their young son Emik, who live there and lovingly care for it. For me, this short trip was a reunion with sacred land. I experienced that day as a ritual within the spiral of time, to once again tread that sacred ground of my youth, now with dreams in my heart of returning to the land of my ancestors.

I met a young and talented witness to the communities organized in defense of their land, connected by family ties and choice to the villages, forests and springs, birds and insects, reptiles and rodents, cornfields and greenhouses that inhabit it. A land of volcanoes with lush avocado, apple, peach, and pear trees. A territory of flowers and aromatic plants with healing essences used in traditional therapies. Ancestry and agroecology find in this land a strength deeply rooted in the land, a promise of life in a present lived with hope amidst so many global uncertainties.

The dream of Tabor - another holy mountain that has always accompanied me as a symbolic place of ancient and new transfigurations, from that of Jesus of Galilee to that of the peoples in resistance and re-existence - is now revived with impetuous force in these parts, now in these sacred mountains.

The volcano evokes the virtuous triangle I've been discovering with friends like Juan Carlos from Peru, Kochurani from India, and Laurel from the United States and El Salvador, as well as with collectives from diverse latitudes, to represent our learning process of sowing combative hope where life is threatened. One vertex of the triangle is the practice of mutual support among individuals and collectives resisting systemic violence as a source of life. The other vertex is the creative experiences where we learn to re-exist, reinventing ourselves from the ruins amidst the Great Catastrophe we are experiencing. And the third vertex is the spiritual and theological seedbeds, with ethical and mystical depth, that we can cultivate collectively to learn to care for ourselves and flourish as individuals and creatures of the cosmos. Soon, in this land of volcanoes, we will create a virtual and in-person seedbed on the decolonial theology we are developing in community.

We will see how the breath of the divine Ruah makes us discover, with exquisite respect for the territory and its inhabitants, new calls to inhabit together the sacred land of the Puebla highlands.

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And speaking of resistance to necropower in the territories, we must now also consider the digital realm where artificial intelligence, manipulated by transnational corporations and authoritarian governments, is designing techno-fascism. For this reason, next Thursday, July 9th, the JobeLab collective, formed by friends from San Cristóbal de Las Casas, will hold the discussion “Disarming Power and Rescuing the Human: Readings on Leo XIV’s Encyclical 'Magnifica Humanitas'‘ at La Madriguera bookstore in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. We will have the participation of experts in computer science, communication, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. Chiapas is a prize for its natural resources, coveted by the industry behind AI, so it is crucial to understand what we are facing. We hope to see you there.

San Juan Tianguismanalco, July 2, 2026

July 4, 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

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