Category: Faith and reason

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
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
Street Art | In Praise of the Bicycle | Buenos Aires, 2015

Of alternate worlds that touch Commemorating the centenary of Ivan Illich's birth

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Between postwar Europe and the Latin America and Caribbean of the modern mirage, there were flows of life and thought that went back and forth between both shores of the Atlantic. What was once the frontier of conquest, colonization, and evangelization—with the Creole and mestizo creations that reinvented the West during the colonial period—became in modern times an ocean of whispers of new worlds, sailing against the current of progress and industrialization.

The 1960s saw the emergence in Cuernavaca, Mexico, of a river of thought flowing "north of the future," as Ivan Illich liked to describe the future arriving to us here and now, quoting the poem by Paul Celan, that Romanian-Jewish author who fascinated him so much:

In the rivers, to the north of the future,
I lay the net that you
hesitant loads
writing on stones,
shades.

In my hand autumn eats its leaf: we are friends.
We extract time from nuts and teach it to walk:
time returns to the nut.

It's Sunday in the mirror,
In sleep one sleeps,
The mouth speaks the truth.

My eye ascends to the sex of my beloved:
We looked at each other,
We say dark words to each other,
We love each other as poppies and memory love each other,
we fell asleep like wine in bowls,
like the sea in the bloody ray of the moon.

We stand embraced at the window, they can see us from the street:
It's time this was known.,
It is time for the stone to bloom,
that a heart beats in the restlessness.
It's time for it to be time.

It's time.

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Austrian researcher Isabella Bruckner, a young professor at the Benedictine Athenaeum of Saint Anselm in Rome, who is now moving to Freiburg im Breisgau, organized a European colloquium to delve into the theological legacy of Ivan Illich, tracing the genealogy of his deepest intuitions about the crisis of instrumental modernity, which arose from what he called the perversion of Christianity.

Together with Professor Martin Kirschner of the Catholic University of Eichstätt in Bavaria, I was invited to give a joint presentation comparing the political theology emerging in certain parts of Germany and Mexico, inspired by Illich's intuitions and ideas. The challenge was twofold: to find common ground and an appropriate language to account for experiences of proximity and conviviality in countries so disparate in their political cultures: the German people currently grappling with the European Union's complicity as an ally of Israel and the United States in their geopolitical war in the Middle East, and the Mexican people seduced by the siren song of the Fourth Transformation and the roar of the World Cup, which silences the tragedy of the disappeared and the corruption of the narco-government in a large part of the country's territory.

When I was invited to participate, I suggested to the organizer that she invite people who for years have been inspired by Illich's thought, particularly Javier Sicilia, Sylvia Marcos, Roberto Ochoa, and Rafael Mondragón, who are little known in European academia. So I undertook the task of presenting in my paper the central ideas of this critical dialogue on what Humberto Beck called the Cuernavaca School, with the Hebrew and Christian thinker of proximity and conviviality. I emphasized the new paths emerging in Mexico and other parts of the world. world below and of the peripheries From the centers of hegemonic power, where resistances flow as other ways of eating, healing and educating —as the late Gustavo Esteva said speaking of revolutionary verbs— to promote territorial, epistemic and spiritual autonomies that sustain communities and peoples who face the many-headed hydra that devours the world.

One of the Illichan themes that most impacted colleagues in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic was his critique of the pharmaceutical industry, promoted by Western democratic governments that imposed public health policies without considering the autonomy of individuals and communities in choosing the most appropriate ways to confront the pandemic. My German colleagues, Martin Kirschner and Markus Riedenauer, emphasized the continued relevance of this critique of the state's power to impose mandatory vaccination programs, disregarding the serious scientific objections to the indiscriminate use of vaccines and the effects they caused in the population.

Another recurring theme in the Rome debates was that of the territorial, epistemic, and cultural autonomies that arise from placing face-to-face proximity at the center of life, or, in Illich's words, the conviviality as a mode of existence and the place which is inhabited with the strength of the vernacular. Both in Europe and in Latin America and the Caribbean, these autonomies have been gaining ground in recent decades, with the conquest of bodies and territories by women, indigenous peoples and collectives queer/cuir /queir, among other resistance groups.

European colleagues were surprised by the diverse approaches to the ethical, political, and spiritual implications of the work of the migrant thinker Ivan Illich. From his diaspora from the clerical Church to his return to medieval classics like Hugh of Saint Victor—and through his time living with Puerto Rican communities in New York and later with peasant communities in Cuernavaca—Illich bore witness to these other worlds that intersect. Fabio Milana, editor, along with Giorgio Agamben, of Illich's work in Italian, presented a gem of archival research from the Illich family to recount Ivan's "vocation," as the young son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father, who cultivated from childhood and adolescence a passion for the thought that arose from Christianity as the event of the Incarnation of the Word of God. This core would later remain as an ember in the work of the migrant thinker to this day, in which we now recover Illich's pristine vision of a powerless church.

The proposal to continue exploring Illich's thought from its various perspectives, both European and Latin American, remains open. We hope to organize a meeting in Cuernavaca that will foster these dialogues and new ways of living together in the conviviality of those who resist the era of the system, reclaiming place and vernacular culture as cornerstones of another possible modernity.

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This week, cultural writing and painting workshops begin in Sots'leb, as part of the preparations for the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Chiapas Revolution, which will take place on Saturday, June 6th in Zinacantán.

I have been fortunate to contribute to the organization of these events, led by Antún Kojtom, a Tseltal painter from Tenejapa, and Xun Betán, a Tsotsil anthropologist and poet from Venustiano Carranza. These acts of collective memory seek to explore the enduring presence of the cultures of the Chiapas Highlands and their encounter with the Dominican friars in a dialogue that began five hundred years ago.

A mural on the esplanade outside the San Lorenzo Mártir temple in Zinacantán will depict scenes from the ancestral religion of the Tsotsil people, such as prayers on the hills led by the Jiloletic, The blessing of the grandmothers and the importance of traditional roles as a bond within the community are also depicted. As part of this ancestral history, the mural's center features a scene of an imagined encounter between a Jilol, or Tsotsil seer, and Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, accompanied behind him by other friars who safeguarded the legacy of the Gospel linked to the defense of the people's rights, such as Friar Matías de Córdoba, who contributed to the independence of Chiapas, and, more recently, Friar Raúl Vera. jTatic Samuel Ruiz walking with the Mayan people. And on the far right of the mural, the master Antún created a beautiful scene of the dialogue between the sage of Pochutla. Chan ak'abal or night serpent, and Friar Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada, both sitting under a ceiba tree, the sacred tree of the Maya of the Lacandon Jungle, listening to each other: the friar speaking with eloquence and respect, the wise Maya pointing to the earth and touching his heart.

Those who can attend on Saturday, June 6th in Zinacantán will be able to participate in the unveiling of the mural, accompanied by Tsotsil poetry and traditional music, thus reaffirming the dialogue of knowledge that we seek to continue promoting between friars and Tsotsil communities, and strengthening the life of the people with the vital sap of their ancestral traditions and the prophetic force of the Gospel.

Rome, May 17, 2026

May 17, 2026

English