Category: Liberating spirituality

Juan Fuentes | Critical Zionism Studies | 2025

The Zionisms that threaten us On the (ab)use of the Bible in times of the Great Nakba

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

In recent weeks, an alert was raised in Chiapas due to the presence of the Israeli group "Heroes for Life" in primary schools in Zinacantán. This group, comprised of young Israelis, offers activities such as English courses and school facility renovations, presenting itself as an "Israeli youth volunteer" experience with a smiling and friendly "humanitarian work" for vulnerable populations around the world. Apparently, many of them and their advisors are active or retired members of the Israeli army who have participated in various Zionist wars, as Herman Bellinghausen recently commented.

A few weeks earlier, the Israeli consul in Mexico, Hilla Burk, accompanied by Israeli security advisors, was received by the Secretary of "People's Security," Óscar Aparicio Avendaño, at his offices in the state government building in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. To this day, the public has not been fully informed about the agenda of that meeting, nor about the agreements reached. According to news reports, in other states such as Chihuahua and Querétaro, Israeli advisory contracts already exist with the current governments regarding strategic security, which include contracts for the sale of "state-of-the-art" technology and weaponry from the growing transnational military industry.

Adding to this Israeli activism in Mexico are the “healing retreats” organized by the Israeli organization Chabat in Cozumel and other Mexican Caribbean beaches, aimed at active and reserve members of the Israeli army who have participated in “the war to defend the State of Israel,” as reported by journalist Georgina Zerega. This is a euphemism to conceal their participation in the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the invasion of southern Lebanon with the Greater Israel project, which, as analyzed by thinker Silvana Rabinovich, includes the construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem as the supreme symbol of this religious war narrative. In some countries, such as Chile, Ireland, and Spain, campaigns have been launched to denounce crimes against humanity committed by Israeli soldiers who are identified passing through these countries, and whom organized civil society and some governments are seeking to bring before national and international courts.

There is a plan for Israeli territorial expansion in Latin America beyond the Middle East, as investigative journalists have documented in Patagonia and Yucatán, strategic locations due to their natural resources such as water, minerals, and rare earth elements.

Behind that humanitarian and tourism facade, Zionism deploys a perverse religious ideology based on a misnamed political theology of election and the promise of the land, making the Bible a weapon of war.

Given this scenario, Christianity faces one of its greatest challenges amidst the civilizational crisis we are experiencing today: discerning the idolatries that supplant the name of God to bring about the death of peoples and the control of strategic territories. Judaism and Islam—in the critical expressions of their own spiritual traditions—will also have to discern the challenge of the Great Nakba, or Great Catastrophe of our time, as the Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the civilizational crisis of the coloniality of techno-fascism.

Pope Leo XIV, for his part, has drawn attention to the “warlords” who control the war economy marked, from now on, by the abusive use of artificial intelligence for the benefit of an oligarchy of digital technocrats, among whom are the owners of the mega-companies of Silicon Valley in California.

But as pastor and teacher in the See of Peter, the transcultural Pope has also denounced the blasphemy of those who use God's name to wage war, without explicitly mentioning Zionism or Trumpism. Indeed, in his first Encyclical Letter, "Magnifica Humanitas," Leo XIV denounces "the ideologies of death" that cause suffering and wars due to the greed of the modern world in its "posthumanist" version, which prepares the way for a species superior to humankind, generated by algorithms, and "transhumanist" because it subordinates humanity to the system controlled by biotechnological devices. This is an apocalypse of humanity that Ivan Illich had already predicted six decades earlier.

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In this context, Christian communities throughout the world—in their diversity of traditions as collectives of believers, academics, and artists, together with social movements of prophetic and liberation inspiration—are called to understand and deactivate Zionism, both Jewish and evangelical, which lies at the root of Israeli territorial expansionism today, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the complicity of the extreme right that haunts political life in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States.

First and foremost, it is about honoring the name of God as divine Wisdom that guides our steps toward justice, peace, and mercy in a world at global war, or, as Silvana Rabinovich calls it, an ongoing “omnicide.” The name of God denotes both the unfathomable divine mystery and the inalienable dignity of creation as the work of His love, which no power in this world can supplant or control. Neither ancient demonology nor the hierarchies of today's necropower lords can replace the divine Glory that always transcends political power, as the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben has so astutely analyzed.

Secondly, it is important to dismantle the political-religious ideology (not political theology in the strict sense) that today turns the Bible into a weapon of war, especially against the Palestinian people and the Semitic peoples of Palestine, both Christian and of other religious traditions. In this regard, Mitri Raheb and Munther Isaac—Palestinian Lutheran theologians resisting the genocide of their people—constantly emphasize the importance of dismantling the Zionist ideology that has manipulated the theology of the land promise and divine election for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.

It is important to remember, as the Mexican-Lebanese intellectual Alfredo Jalife-Rahme points out, that the Zionist lobby in the United States and Great Britain created the Zionist ideology in the 19th century as an expression of the colonialism of the Jews of the Diaspora, who are not Semites but descendants of the Jewish presence in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Zionism originated as a political ideology for the control of the territory of Palestine for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.

And third, we must remember that the Zionist expansionism that has reached Mexico, specifically Chiapas, requires critical monitoring by civil society, churches, and governments regarding its plans to control territories. This expansion is justified by the ideological narrative disseminated by the Israeli state under Netanyahu and his Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, with its brazenly promoted genocidal and expansionist logic of Greater Israel. The Zionist project is rooted in a powerful war industry that makes Jewish and Christian Zionism a threat to humanity and our common home.

Following the threads of decolonial theology, both Jewish and Christian, it is necessary to reread the Bible as the book of faith of the Semitic peoples in the promise of the living God, who is progressively opening himself to all nations of humanity as recipients of the messianic times that overcome fratricidal violence and establish a new humanity. This is a theology of “the meek who will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5), according to the poetic imagination of Jesus of Galilee, as Mitri Raheb reminds us, stemming from the God of life's preferential option for the poor and excluded of all times. It is a theology of the promise fulfilled in the event of the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ of God, which brings to its most radical expression the manifestation “not of a God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). Promise and choice that the Abba of Jesus always fulfills from those excluded from hegemonic systems of domination to summon all the peoples of the earth to the feast of desire, as proposed by the Mexican queer theologian Ángel Méndez.

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Once the civil society of Chiapas and Mexico discovers the threads woven today by Jewish and Christian Zionism, which is expanding throughout the world in complicity with techno-fascist companies and governments that promote discrimination against peoples and religions, it will be necessary to promote communities of encounter between diverse spiritual traditions, in mutual support, nurturing the resistance to evil with such diverse faces.

Caring for the children and youth of Chiapas in the face of the threat of Zionism today, together with the accountability of authorities at different levels of government in the financing and management of public security, will allow the creation of environments of unrestricted respect for human dignity, with special attention to the most marginalized and vulnerable people and communities.

Then we must promote the celebration of divine blessing for all nations, not only for the Jewish people who in their Zionist version are betraying their vocation to be witnesses of the Eternal, as described by André Neher, the great French Jewish thinker of the 20th century.

Let us not forget that messianic times come to all peoples - in the midst of the history of humanity threatened with death, but promised fullness by the God of Life - thanks to the righteous people of history who give their lives for the world that came from God, not from the powerful of this world.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, June 20, 2026

June 20, 2026
JobeLab | San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas | 2026

JobeLab An initiative of critical thinking and diverse spiritualities from San Cristóbal de Las Casas

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

From the second half of the 20th century, Chiapas became a laboratory of new ways of inhabiting and thinking about the world, with the creative confluence of important social, political, cultural and spiritual processes.

Among them, dynamism stands out synodal (or shared path by all the believing people with their diversity of ministries) of six decades, implemented by the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas with jTatik Samuel Ruiz as pastor walker And hundreds of local, regional, and international communities and groups, convened for justice and peace for the Indigenous peoples and other communities of this region of Chiapas. In an astonishing confluence of paths, the Indigenous Congress of 1974 marked the beginning of the public presence of Indigenous peoples with their own voice. Indigenous, mestizo, and international social and cultural movements also emerged, with research projects on the rich Mayan heritage, both ancient and modern, developed by teams of social anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguisticists. Waves of researchers arrived from Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and, with an academic model still largely based on extractive practices, made significant discoveries in the social sciences and humanities. The translation of the Bible into Mayan languages, initially promoted by the Summer School of Bible as part of a U.S. interventionist plan, evolved into intercultural dialogue, continued to this day by various Christian churches, including the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, the Zapatista movement, with its armed and media-driven uprising of 1994, became the watershed moment of a social, political, and cultural insurrection that continues to this day as one of the most radical critiques of the hegemonic system of the multi-headed capitalist hydra, including patriarchy and colonialism.

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The “San Cristóbal School” is a name proposed decades ago by Pablo Romo and others in academia and the arts to evoke the legacy of critical thought, resistance, and spirituality that emerged in Chiapas, as a counterpart to the Cuernavaca School, analyzed by Humberto Beck. In their connections and differences, both represent significant contributions to critical thought that arose in Mexico during the last century.

In this way, recognizing the individuals, groups, organizations, and initiatives of civil society that have been an active part of these processes, as a collective inspired by them, with JobeLab -apocope of Jobel which is the Tsotsil name of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and laboratory To designate this city as a laboratory, we seek to give continuity to such a legacy in a new context, focusing on critical thinking and the spiritualities that have sustained them, such as those of the native peoples, Catholic Christianity, and more recently Buddhism and Islam.

Through the initiative JobeLab. Ongoing dialogues and mutual support for re-existences We will continue to cultivate this heritage in the new scenario of the civilizational crisis that humanity faces in the second quarter of the 21st century, where peaceful coexistence between nations and the balance of planet Earth are at risk and call us to promote processes of resistance and re-existence.

We will nurture this initiative based on two inspiring attitudes that are, at the same time, transversal axes of the talks, meetings and festivals that we will organize in various spaces of the city: hospitality and commensality.

The hospitality It is one of the human gestures that most powerfully expresses our shared human condition, that is, our way of becoming individuals and communities as beings in relation to one another. This radical attitude of openness to otherness is a fundamental ethical and political act, where the religions and spiritualities of humanity celebrate a glimpse of divinity.

The commensality, Like the other side of the moon, it is the nourishing soil where we receive the otherness of Mother Earth, of other humans who become our neighbors, and of Divinity, through food and drink created by the unique genius of each people. We celebrate this gift as an inclusive banquet where Divine Sophia prepares a table for all nations and creatures of the cosmos.

Together with Carmen Reyes and Ricardo Hernández, Angélica Evangelista and Abraham Mena, I am enthusiastically participating in this project, drawing on the Dominican tradition of life and thought. In these exchanges, we seek to discover new expressions of the divine and human Word as a creative fire that redeems, animates, and shelters us in our present circumstances. times of hardship as a human species that puts itself and the Common Home at risk, leading us to the precipice of annihilation.

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This week two events will be the formal presentation of JobeLab, after the first event where the initiative germinated, on January 28, with a presentation on Gaza and Chiapas at the Charity temple in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

On Wednesday, March 25th at 5:30 pm, we will hold the discussion “The School of San Cristóbal,” with the participation of Pablo Romo, who was one of the key figures in the diocesan process of promoting human rights, paving the way for the creation of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center. Martha Elena Welsh, choreographer who animates in Xitla House In Mexico City, workshops were held to support people in situations of extreme vulnerability, facing various forms of violence. And Juan Carlos La Puente, a Peruvian with extensive international experience in providing spiritual support to human rights defenders, has been developing a methodology for this purpose from his base in Oregon, USA. permanent discernment as a path of body for people and communities in re-existence.

And then, on Friday, March 27th at 5 p.m., we will explore another facet of re-existence: forgiveness as a path to reconciliation in contexts of violence. With the Muslim community of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, represented by Shaykh Yahya Rhodus and Shaykh Mudar Abudlghani, we will discuss forgiveness in Christian and Muslim traditions as a common path to peace, at a critical moment of violence in the Middle East. And we will do so accompanied by the extraordinary music and song of Nader Khan, a Canadian Sufi artist.

We invite you to be a part of JobeLab From wherever we may be, whether attending talks and meetings, or imagining and creating similar spaces where we can come together and flourish as individuals and communities in resistance and re-existence, going beyond the spiral of violence that surrounds us, towards a world another world of hospitality and commensality.

Jobel, March 23, 2026

March 23, 2026
Pilar Emitxin | Embodied poetics | 2019

The House of the Incarnate Word A commitment to social and cultural dialogue in Chiapas in the style of the Dominicans

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

A few days ago, we opened a new space for dialogue in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas on the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas. This was the first event in a year-long celebration of the fifth centenary of the arrival of the Dominican friars to Tierra Firme, as the American continent was then called. Abya Yala. Next June we will be holding various cultural and religious events, both in San Cristóbal and in Zinacantán, with the program 500-OP Chiapas which we will announce soon.

Together with Abraham and Angélica, dear friends from Ecosur with whom we worked in university ministry at CUC years ago in Mexico City, and with Carmen and Ricardo, friends involved in social and cultural activism in the city, we have been imagining together a project to continue cultivating the great legacy of the School of San Cristóbal, as it is called Pablo Romo to critical thinking and inculturated liberation theology that has developed in the Highlands of Chiapas for more than half a century, with the specific contribution of the Dominicans in these lands. There are many cultural forums that currently exist here—such as CIDECI and Dialectics in the Museum. jTatik Samuel, El Paliacate, Galería MUY and many more – where it is possible to talk about urgent and important issues for the cosmopolitan society that lives here – a microcosm of Mayan, mestizo and foreign peoples – with its many local, regional and global connections.

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Since the 1970s, San Cristóbal de Las Casas has been the scene of important meetings such as the First Indigenous Congress convened by Bishop Samuel Ruiz and leaders of indigenous communities in 1974, it proved to be a watershed moment in the indigenous consciousness of Mexico, as it refers Fabiola Ramírez in her Master of Arts thesis at Tulane University. She also highlights the First International Symposium of Lascasistas, The event, organized by Manuel Velasco Suárez, Agustín Yáñez, and the Dominican friar Enrique Ruiz, was held in 1974. Both events shared a common thread—starting with the fifth centenary of the birth of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas—the search for paths to promote justice for the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, subjected for almost five hundred years to a racist system, marked by centuries of social injustice and the suppression of their collective imaginaries in their cultural and religious expressions. The spirit of liberation theology, as a creative reception of the Second Vatican Council, was mediated by the prophetic force of the Second General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops in Medellín in 1968, ecclesial events in which they participated. jTatik Samuel Ruiz, made their presence felt with vigor and creative imagination in these lands.

Two decades of sowing the Gospel in the diocese, with its message of liberation for oppressed peoples, allowed that seed to germinate into a diocesan synod, intimately connected with the indigenous cause, which found in the Zapatista movement one of its most relevant expressions for promoting the autonomy of native peoples. There were other fruitful fruits, such as indigenous theology, which, not without difficulty with Vatican authorities, also expressed the vitality of a profound ecclesial process that continues to this day.

But the old Royal City of the colonial era, inhabited by a mestizo and Creole population that called itself intercultural, He had become accustomed to living with the "Indians" in modern times with a normalized racism, which was expressed as paternalistic assistance from the caxlanes or Creole chieftains towards the Indians, as Rosario Castellanos masterfully recounted in her collection of short stories Ciudad Real.

The Zapatista uprising, in addition to its political effects—with the 1996 San Andrés Accords betrayed by the federal government and the creation of the Caracoles or Zapatista autonomous municipalities—had a cultural impact on the city, which suddenly became more cosmopolitan in its daily life, as they tell university students Immigrants in the Highlands of Chiapas since the years surrounding the uprising. As early as the 1950s, Harvard anthropologists and linguists from the Summer School of the Bible had arrived in the Jobel Valley to settle in the colonial city, turning it into a base for their research trips to the indigenous communities they studied, mostly using an extractive academic or religious model.

But over time, the gentrification of the city of traditional neighborhoods It grew in an unusual way as a result of the rebellion of the canyons that impacted the Highlands of Chiapas in the last three decades.

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Today, more than fifty years after that Indigenous Congress of 1974, and thirty-two years after the Zapatista uprising of 1994, much has changed in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Indigenous communities have achieved diverse forms of autonomy in the political, social, and cultural spheres, including religious matters, surpassing the vision of their initial proponents. These communities are no longer under the tutelage of political parties, churches, universities, or civil society organizations. The cultural fusion of Indigenous peoples with hip-hop music, audiovisual culture, and contemporary art will surprise many. Indigenous identity now transcends even revolutionary movements.

And like a boomerang effect, the mixed-race and foreign population living in the city also blends into this landscape of identities. An event about Gaza primarily draws university students and members of civil society, but attracts few of the displaced Indigenous people who live in the northern part of the city. A hip-hop concert, on the other hand, fills plazas. And then there's the Sinaloan band invited to the Zinacantán festival, which will keep the Tsotsil youth on tenterhooks for hours, mesmerized by a professional stage that rivals any pop or ranchera music festival in any major city in the country—and, incidentally, managed by a young entrepreneur from Zinacantán.

How can we participate in these ongoing cultural changes using the Dominican word itself, not only from the past but also from the present, in its diverse forms of life with friars, sisters, and lay people inspired by the charism of preaching? What signs of the times... deglobalization It is necessary to interpret in order to scrutinize the passage of the God of Life, As the Dominican friar Gustavo Gutiérrez said in Peru, what is needed for a humanity bewildered by global violence?

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The roaming This is a vital attitude of the Dominicans since their founding by Dominic of Guzmán in the 13th century, a time of transition from feudal to urban society. "Holy preaching," the initial name of Dominic's apostolic project conceived with Bishop Diego de Osma, the layman Peter Seila of Toulouse, and Wilhelmina and Raymonda Claret, sisters from Prouille in southern France, expresses the original inspiration of a spiritual tradition that has dedicated itself for eight centuries to seeking truth in every age, trusting in the power of the Word made flesh. Therefore, it is not just any truth that is being sought, but the truth that liberates, saves, and redeems humankind, humanity, and the cosmos from the bonds of evil, as did the Galilean.

The Dominican-style study is, therefore, the spring of hope According to that beautiful reflection by Friar Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Order of Preachers, this spirit led the friars to disperse throughout Europe from the beginning, going to universities "to study and found monasteries," that is, communities of life centered on the Incarnate Word. This impetus took them as far as Mongolia in search of Genghis Khan. This itinerancy was described by Matthew of Paris, the staunch enemy of the new friars at the Sorbonne in the 13th century, who scornfully declared: "Their cloister is the oceans and their cell the world," thus defining for posterity the daemon or the genius of the religious order that was emerging in the medieval towns, as Father Chenu repeatedly reminded us doctoral students in Paris.

Centuries later, already in Chiapas, that same itinerant journey led Friar Pedro Lorenzo to the Jataté canyons and the Lacandon Jungle to search there, “in the middle of nowhere,” as the prior of Santo Domingo de Ciudad Real admonished him for his rebellion, for the people who lived there. That is why from then on he decided to call himself Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada, according to Jan de Vos.

In our times of the Great Catastrophe—begun in Gaza and now spread throughout the world in the Trump era—itinerantness leads us to new territories to be created as places of conviviality of the Word. Here in the Highlands of Chiapas, we'll do it like new. itinerant space, where we can foster creative dialogues in search of the truth that saves.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, February 7, 2026

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February 7, 2026

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