Category: Liberating spirituality

Carlos Mendoza | Door of no return (detail) | Cotonou, August 1, 2026

The door of no return Some echoes of the XII World Forum on Theology and Liberation

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Ouidah is the symbolic port of captivity, human trafficking, and African slavery at the dawn of modernity. It represents the dark side of the moon of the egoic dream of Western reason, which became a nightmare for those subjected to the dominating libido of European conquering power.

This small city on the Atlantic coast of Benin, in West Africa, has slowly transformed the memory of the atrocious suffering endured by around fourteen million people - who were enslaved by Portuguese traders, from the 16th to the 18th century - into a territory of resistance and hope for its survivors.

«"Africa Decides" is a cultural community center that promotes the healing of the collective memory of the survivors of those individuals and communities deported to Brazil five hundred years ago. It was an unprecedented diaspora that crossed "the door of no return," a succinct expression to describe the horror of those generations who never went home.

In the 19th century, after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, some decided to return from northeastern Brazil to their homeland in Benin, the former kingdom of Dahomey. They returned with the longing to find the land from which they had been taken, the land that was etched into their bodies, hearts, and souls. That indelible mark was what drew them back.

But upon returning, these new generations from the diaspora discovered a different time and place, where they didn't recognize their families or their crops. Their land had been colonized by France in the 18th century until its independence in 1960. Another period of dispossession that, to this day, has left a mark of impoverishment on the daily lives of its people. The country had a brief socialist period between 1960 and 1975 that left a legacy of social unrest, until it transitioned to a Western-style democracy with a strong influence in the West African region.

Those who had been resurrected had returned to reunite with their ancestors and reclaim their path as a diaspora people with those who remained behind. The revival of Vodou in present-day Benin represents a way of recovering precisely that collective memory that was stolen from them and left tattooed on their bodies and souls. It is a radically different mark from the brand of slavery imposed with a hot iron on their black skin, by which the trafficker assigned them an owner, a plantation, and a task that ranged from forced labor on the farms to systematic sexual abuse. These were practices that lasted for centuries and proved to be the foundation of the enrichment by dispossession that created modern European wealth.

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Silvia Regina de Lima Silva is a decolonial feminist theologian who has participated in the World Forum on Theology and Liberation for many years. She spoke to us from her own history as an Afro-Brazilian woman, rooted in both Christianity and Candomblé. She wove a narrative from her diasporic history of "returning home." Silvia proposed that we consider decoloniality as a process of liberation from diverse colonialities—those of power-knowledge-being analyzed by the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano—in which she delved into the spiritual depths of this devastating process she called "coloniality of the soul," a process of domination that, in her own words, consists of "killing one's own beliefs from within." The deepest aspect of modern coloniality, intrinsically linked to racism, is, for her, this servitude of being in its deepest spiritual impulses.

In dialogue with Silvia Regina, we have begun a joint theological reflection to consider the new forms of Christianity that can emerge from this process of "decolonizing the soul," engaging in creative dialogue with the spiritual traditions that inhabit our bodies and imaginations. Each of us, from our own "place," our "body," our "deepest being of believers," explores dialogues, mixtures, dynamic syntheses, and other practices of diverse spiritualities that we now call "dual belonging," or perhaps "mutual belonging," until we find no other way to speak of new ways of living in the divine Ruah.

Whether in South Africa or Brazil, in Benin or Chiapas, we, the people, are living through the time of that "return," to give a decolonial turn to the history of coloniality of yesterday and today, giving way to spiritualities of the pluriverse.

The "no return" signifies today a generating impulse of new spiritual communities of shared belonging, where traditions leave behind the logic of the coloniality of the soul to give way to a "decoloniality of believing" as a source of full life for all the spiritual traditions of humanity.

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The World Social Forum is about to take place in Benin, updating the "spirit of Porto Alegre" that inspired social movements in the Global South to seek "other possible worlds." As an alternative to the Davos Forum, controlled by governments and transnational corporations from the Global North, this forum has, for more than twenty-five years, sought to build networks of solidarity among social movements for justice, human rights, and the care of the planet from an alter-globalization perspective.

In the context of de-globalization, the financial oligarchy and the "warlords" who control the global economy and world politics today, enormous challenges are emerging for the articulation of resistance to this "war against humanity," as the Zapatistas from southeastern Mexico call it.

In the coming days, we will learn how these networks are being woven amidst an uncertain local context. It is a time for creativity, for mutual listening, support, South-South solidarity, and the cross-cutting nature of resistance. Indigenous peoples, women, children, and youth, along with so many other collectives resisting systemic violence, continue to weave their voices, where the recovery of each people's soul will be the compass for the birth of these other worlds, "where many worlds fit.".

Cotonou, August 2, 2026

August 2, 2026
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

English