Category: Geopolitics and spirituality

  • Las paces desde abajoTings Chak, “Palestine Will Be Free,” 2023 (courtesy of the artist).

    Peace from below

    By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

    Two years after the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Trump recently "decreed" his peace plan for Palestine, with the submissive presence of an international "negotiation" group made up of Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, with the complicity of European political leaders from Italy, Great Britain, and Spain who claim to "seek peace for the region."

    That plan, of course, fails to address justice for the Palestinian victims of the genocide, much less reparations for the economic and cultural devastation wreaked by Netanyahu's Israeli government. With criminal cynicism, Trump visited Israel to reaffirm his alliance with the Israeli prime minister and try to shield him from the accountability to which all war criminals must be held, a project promoted by a minority group of Israeli citizens with a handful of allies in the government.

    The international community now faces the most radical challenge since World War II: to promote a trial for crimes against humanity against Netanyahu and other Israeli military personnel, along with their accomplices from other complicit states, such as Trump and leaders of the European Union. This will involve judging a systematic war against the Palestinian people that began in 1947, when the Nakba or catastrophe that to this day is taking the extermination of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to extremes.

    The accusation of war crimes against Israel filed by South Africa more than a year ago was only the beginning of a long process of international diplomacy that could one day lead to the creation of an international trial similar to that of Nuremberg in the last century to judge the crimes of the Nazi regime.

    ∂

    But there are other "peaces" (plural: peace) that are worth keeping in mind, located at the bottom of the world of imperial domination, because they are the ones that endure over time and are rooted in the lives of communities.

    We are referring to those that were built against the current of hatred from political leaders by collectives of Palestinian and Jewish women, who organized communal events before the attacks of October 8, 2023, only to be later banned by the Israeli government. But there are also the "peaces" that Kurdish women forge in the face of the violence of the Turkish state. And those that Zapatista women build day by day to reclaim their bodies and territories in Chiapas.

    Carmenmargarita Sánchez de León just presented a few months ago at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City a doctoral thesis in critical gender studies about the resistance of Puerto Rican women creating on many fronts the construction of peace for their people colonized by the US government since 1952, when it was incorporated as a free associated state, a recent mode of colonization of territory within the parameters of modern law. These other peaces are woven body to body, in the mutual care of those who know they are vulnerable but powerful when they connect their wounds. The Ilé Collective in Puerto Rico that analyzes this doctoral thesis, as well as other decolonial feminist collectives such as the Feminist Collective under Construction, they reclaim urban spaces on the island, criticize the public debt of the state of Puerto Rico imposed by the US federal administration, but they also weave sisterhood among women racialized by the white patriarchy through collaborative networks in the production of goods and the formation of decolonial feminist thinking.

    The Women's Pacific Route In Colombia, it represents another attempt to weave peace from below, not from agreements between the actors in the massacres, which were the paramilitaries, the army and the Colombian state, but rather the peace that emerges from listening carefully to the victims and some executioners who seek to acknowledge their guilt, to move towards justice, reparation and thus perhaps one day receive the gift of reconciliation for the wounded social body.

    A paradoxical but significant example of these other ways of building peace is that of the families of missing persons who, upon arriving in a town or city, plant a "tree of memory" with photos of their missing loved ones and a few banners asking for empathy and solidarity from the community they are visiting. They also seek to weave threads of peace with the mailbox they place in the plaza where people can anonymously write information to help them find their missing relatives. Through this means, it has been possible to find clandestine graves, brothels, forced labor farms producing poppies, or drug labs, where their children may be, alive or dead. The searching mothers don't primarily ask for justice or revenge, but rather for information. In this way, they humanize the perpetrators by creating search spaces to find "their treasures," asking for clues that may lead to the whereabouts of their loved ones.

    These are the peace that matters because they are slowly woven by people and communities in resistance, especially by women who deconstruct patriarchy.

    Precisely there, in the cracks of those walls of hatred, other ways of existing with justice and dignity are woven, where peace gradually takes root.

    ∂

    And what can we do to create peace for the Palestinian people and the other Semitic peoples who have shared the same land for thousands of years?

    To begin, we must stay informed from credible sources about what is happening in Palestine and then connect virtually or in person with a Palestinian community in resistance in those lands, or in the diaspora, to promote listening and person-to-person dialogue. A second step is to better understand the Jewish communities that closely support the cause of the Palestinian people and their right to live in that land. It is important to remember that there are Palestinians and Jews in the diaspora who share a love for the land of Palestine and a desire to find ways for brotherly peoples to once again live together in the same land.

    Perhaps many years will have to pass before there is peace in Palestine, until the sister peoples descended from Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar —yes, all three and their descendants— recognize their shared right to inhabit the same land. In the meantime, building peace will be the task of all communities, wherever they may be.

    Because Palestine is the compass of humanity, divided today, hopefully also in the process of conversion. Let us make peace possible for the Palestinian people, together with their sister nations, by weaving "peaces" where each of us lives. Only in this way can we continue to imagine a future as a human species before we fall into the abyss.

    ∂

    This morning I arrived in the southern lands that rise between the majestic Andes mountain range and the Pacific Ocean, where the Mapuche and Chilean peoples inhabit the same territory with many barriers that even the democratic governments of recent decades have been unable to tear down. I have come here to discuss with university colleagues the validity and limits of liberation theology, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the death of Gustavo Gutiérrez (Gustavo Gutiérrez International Congress)I will also be able to talk with colleagues from the Chilean Theological Society about the difficult hope in times of catastrophe. And I am very excited to be able to visit Mapuche territory for the first time to hear about the resistance these communities have created to confront so many forms of colonialism, both old and new.Mapuche thought, autonomy and colonialism in Chile).

    In the next post I will be able to tell you some of these stories.

    Santiago, Chile, October 19, 2025

  • Pensar el misterio de Dios desde las ruinas del imperio Sobre encuentros en tierras de Macrina y sus hermanos capadociosCarlos Mendoza | Monasteries of Göreme, Cappadocia | 2025

    Thinking about the mystery of God from the ruins of the empire About meetings in the lands of Macrina and her Cappadocian brothers

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    Seven years ago in Toronto a theological initiative was born - during a conversation with Claudio Monge of the Dominican Study Institute (Dost-I) of Istanbul– to think together with other Dominicans about the meaning of preaching the Gospel in today’s laboratory cities, following the style of the order of preachers that for eight centuries has had as its motto “ueritas” to seek the truth wherever it is found, as did Albert the Great in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas and later Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, the School of Salamanca and Bartholomew de Las Casas in the 16th century until reaching the School of Le Saulchoir in the 20th century.

    We exchanged many emails and virtual meetings over the years, inviting Dominican friars, sisters, and lay people dedicated to theological work to share this concern. On the horizon of those years, we saw the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE as a propitious occasion to meet in Istanbul, a city located in a symbolic territory of that ancient Christian past that today urgently calls us to return to the sources of faith.

    This is a very different contemporary context from that of the Emperor Constantine and the bishops of the Eastern Church gathered at the council that defined the orthodoxy of the Christian faith in a Greek key. From the ruins of the Eastern Roman Empire, which somewhat resemble the ruins of the modern West today, we perceived the call to "give an account of the hope to anyone who asks us" (1 Peter 3:15).

    Nicaea 2025 was emerging as an opportune moment to return to the sources of the living Tradition of the Christian faith in its founding event, which is the power of the love of the triune God manifested in the life and Passover of Jesus the Galilean, with the depth of the Greek categories such as person (prosopon), substance (ousia) and loving circularity (perijoresis) to spell out the mystery of the Abba heavenly revealed in Jesus Christ by the inner fire of the divine Ruah.

    Along the way, the personal and professional priorities of those who initially responded to the proposal gradually shifted, until finally, last year, a group of twelve Dominican friars and sisters from Italy, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Mexico, and India began preparing a meeting in Istanbul. This would be the starting point for a shared journey toward theology at the "frontiers" of the contemporary world, as the friars' general chapters had pointed out in the post-conciliar period; located at "the fractures of humanity," as our brother Pierre Claverie, the Bishop of Algiers, murdered along with a friend and collaborator by religious fundamentalism, said; and present as preaching communities in the heart of the laboratory cities of the global village.

     

    ∂

     

    Istanbul is a multifaceted and vibrant city, the epicenter of a modern Islamic culture, traversing with difficulty and imagination the tense borders between religions, cultures, and economies in the complex geopolitical context of deglobalization. Christian communities make up less than 2% of the population. The power of Turkish-style Islam and its Ottoman past shines proudly in its mosques, universities, and bazaars. The great basilica of Hagia Sophia, which served as the seat of the Christian Patriarchate of the East for over a thousand years until the collapse of Eastern Christianity in 1453, has once again become a mosque after a brief hiatus from Turkish secularism, which is now sorely missed in the country's cultural life. The church of the Chora In a newly restored neighborhood of the city, with its splendid frescoes and icons of Christian art, it is a shining flash of that Byzantine past in the midst of the effervescent modern city.

    The "Nicea OP 2025" colloquium was a very modest gathering that built bridges with a few colleagues from Turkey interested in dialogue with the Christian West, especially through art and spirituality as a means of expression for the religions of the book (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), such as Professor Elif Tokay, who works on these topics with her graduate students at Istanbul University.

    The program of the meeting consisted of three days of reflecting on the meaning of the Christian faith in the context of interreligious dialogue, to accompany communities of faith in living the testimony of the Eternal God amidst the ruins of modern civilization, which find in Gaza their breaking point of that "dream of reason that has produced monsters," as the Spanish engraver Francisco de Goya declared in the late 18th century.

    From three theological categories common to the religions of the Book: salvation, creation, and sanctification, we shaped our dialogue, bringing each of these words into our context to interpret them today. Salvation amidst the systemic violence that produces discrimination, exclusion, and death of the majority; Creation as a cosmology of the new creation that explores ecotheology in dialogue with modern science and ancestral knowledge; and sanctification as a process of divinization of the cosmos and humanity through the power of the Spirit of God, inspiring processes of healing, memory, justice, and reconciliation, especially for the victims of humanity's violent history.

    Following this path, each day we focused on one of these axes, starting with an initial presentation by one of the participants, and then engaging in an exchange of experiences and ideas about what the preaching of the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ means in each of these areas.

    The second part of the day was led by Jean-Jacques Perennès and Elif Tokay, who, listening to the initial conversation, opened up new horizons based on their experience and reflection.

    Jean-Jacques, as a French Dominican who has lived in the Arab world for more than three decades, guided us with his knowledge of Islamic cultures to think about the meaning of preaching in those worlds (Bibliography of Jean-Jacques Pérennès), very close to Pierre Claverie and the monks of Tibihrine who offered their lives in Algeria for friendship with people and communities of Islam. He worked at the Dominican Institute in Cairo (Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies), then as assistant in the apostolic life of the Dominican friars during the government of Friar Timothy Radcliffe as master of the order, and more recently as director of the Jerusalem Bible School.

    Elif, as a researcher of Byzantine and Eastern Christianity around the concept of perfection or divinization (theosis) in Christian mystical thought, helped us with her comments and questions to find common ground with the spirituality of Islam. Given her doctoral work on Gregory of Nazianzus as a father of the Anatolian Church, as well as on patristic works translated from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, she opened up a unique and valuable perspective for exploring these connections between communities of believers from diverse traditions, meeting at this common point of the divinization of the cosmos and humanity.

    A visit to the ruins of Nicaea, today Izink in Anatolia (Archaeologists Discover Tombs at the Underwater Basilica in İznik), on a rainy day before the colloquium, had already set a certain tone for the conversations. How could we connect that crucial moment in ancient Christianity to speak of the divine being as a loving communion amidst today's ruins with the challenges that arise for Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities today in times of extreme violence?

    At the conclusion of our meeting, we agreed to continue building collaborative networks with Dominican friars, sisters, and lay people present with their preaching in today's laboratory cities and their communities of dialogue, both local and virtual, especially with the youngest members of the Dominican family, to deepen their understanding of the faith in the service of the People of God today.

    I proposed preparing the next meeting in Mexico in 2026 to continue exploring the paths of "holy preaching" in that other geography of the global and epistemic South, to search there, amidst other ruins that are those of the region of non-being and of those who dwell in the shadows of shadows, for alternative ways to live and think about the loving mystery of God from the cracks of today's hegemonic power with its idolatries and traps that have humanity and the planet in check.

     

    ∂

     

    After a modest yet profound encounter with this Dominican family atmosphere, I set out to visit Cappadocia for the first time.

    The land of Basil and Gregory, the famous "Cappadocian Fathers," who made a decisive contribution in the fourth century CE to developing a theology of the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Holy Trinity. Their texts had been key sources for the patristic courses I took, first in Mexico with Friar Luis Ramos in his classes at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), and then in Fribourg with Friar Christoph Schönborn, then a professor at that Swiss university who later served in his pastoral ministry as Cardinal of Vienna for many years.

    Although I remembered having read some reference to Macrina - the eldest sister of that illustrious Anatolian family who first suffered Roman persecution and then became a promoter of the nascent monastic life - it was by going to her land that I was able to grasp her great influence as a believing woman of her time, especially in the development of an alternative spirituality to that of the Roman Empire that her brother Naucratius also explored, together with his friend Chrysaphius, as part of the early Christian monasticism on the banks of the Iris River, today Kyzilirmark, from the Pontus region.

    Present-day Cappadocia bears no resemblance to its Hittite, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman past. Twenty-first-century Turkish modernity has brought modern urban centers dedicated to agriculture and mining to the region, with a powerful tourism industry catering to travelers from China, Russia, and Japan, who fill the skies of Cappadocia with hot-air balloons to fly over the archaeological sites of ancient rock-cut monasteries; or as swarms of tourists who collapse the underground cities created by its inhabitants since Hittite and Persian times to survive the intermittent wars of the rotating empires.

    In the midst of these hordes of tourists today in lands of ancient history, I took on the task of making meditative walks through these places, trying to suspend time, to reread some fragments of the history of the Cappadocian Fathers and especially the The life of Macrina and her family, told by her brother Gregory of NyssaI am left with Macrina's deathbed prayer: "You, Lord, have freed us from the fear of death. You have made the end of life here below the beginning of true life for us. You rest our bodies in sleep for a time and will awaken them again with the trumpet of the end of time."

    From their testimony, I am impressed by the depth of their hope, with an eschatological imagination for the day to come. Not scorning this world, but opening it to the perspective of the Love that never ends.

    Perhaps this is what we need today, in times of environmental and historical catastrophe, to reflect on the mystery of God amidst the ruins of the empires of yesterday and today. To open our hearts and minds to other possible worlds, emerging from the ruins with the cries of the survivors. Other worlds, too, offered by the God of life who never ceases to love all of his creation without condition or measure.

     

    Cappadocia, October 7, 2025

  • Una flor de composta O sobre las re-existencias en medio de la catástrofeCarlos Mendoza | Re-exists 2025 | Opening Ritual 23 IX 25

    A compost flower Or about re-existences in the midst of catastrophe

    By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

     

    At the end of September, more than eighty people from survivor groups around the world gathered for a meeting of mutual listening, deepened by attentive dialogues with university students and nourished by provocations from artist groups. We were received with the magnificent hospitality of the Jorge Manzano Chair from ITESO that became home for a few days.

    We began by celebrating the resistances that transform what seems like waste through love, inspired during the opening ceremony by the renowned Catalan singer Lídia Pujol who whispered that “from the compost that is rottenness, the flower can emerge” (Babel). She had discovered this wisdom in the poetry of her 12th-century countryman Ramon Llull, who recounted that “having found a friend who was dying without love, when he asked him why he was dying without love, he replied that no one had made him know about love or had taught him to be a lover.”

    Angelica, from the lands of Malaysia, scattered grains of rice and Himalayan salt as an offering during the inaugural ritual, during which we prepared to listen attentively to the otherness that welcomes us as Mother Earth and inhabits us as Divinity that animates us with its ineffable breath of life.

    Five tables, each with representatives from six collectives, divided into Spanish and English language groups, were the place where we listened to each other each morning, exchanging experiences to awaken, heal, and embrace each other, drawing on the inner vulnerability of each person and collective. Each table had two listeners, who identified the similarities and differences between the experiences described, thus weaving together a mutual accompaniment of solidarity and hope to confront the local and global horror we were describing. Raúl, a young Mayan popular educator through hip hop in Chiapas, commented that "no one had ever sat at a table to listen to my knowledge." Nancy, a Latina feminist theologian from the United States, along with Bosque, a biologist and environmental-spiritual activist from Cuernavaca, were tasked, like other members of academia and organized civil society present at the meeting, with cultivating this attentive listening to weave a common narrative amidst the differences of each experience and context.

    Thus, we respectfully explored the sacred ground of resistance and re-existence. First, by approaching the horror, which we named according to the stories each person told. Sofía, for example, shared her experience as a young Ecuadorian migrant lawyer in Barcelona, where for several years she has worked with undocumented domestic workers in a feminist "coalition" that led them to form a union to strengthen them in the fight for their rights as migrant women while allowing them to develop artisanal skills to support their cause. Sofía's reflection echoed that of Alex, a graphic designer and popular artist who accompanies the Ecclesial Base Communities of El Salvador in the face of President Bukele's state of emergency. Now in its fourth year under an authoritarian leader, this regime of exception produces a filthy life for poor youth in the Salvadoran peripheries accused of criminality to whitewash a regime that has been colluding with criminal mafias for years. The resistance of both groups, in Catalonia and El Salvador, exuded an "interiority" that inspires them in their daily struggles. Christian spirituality in the Salvadoran case and feminist sorority in the Catalan case.

    But it wasn't just about sharing the spoken word; it was about exploring other languages through workshops on body language and sound expression, or through the Jauja dance in the Peruvian Andean highlands as a path of resistance for a people, thus discovering other modes of communication between the seeking mothers and the healing companions who came from South Dakota or Malaysia. These other languages allowed us to overcome language barriers and helped us create powerful nonverbal communication bonds.

    And to tie knots in the fabric of the threads intertwined in each day, the performances, like the one prepared with much love and talent by a Portland collective to celebrate the water that makes us up, thus helping us feel that we are water. To the rhythm of hip hop and rap as an alternative urban art proposal, the Mayan collectives of Chiapas that educate children threatened by drug cartels in the outskirts of cities in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, turned out to be a balm to heal wounds still open from other violence. Like that narrated by Vero looking for her son Diego, missing for ten years, or the violence against girls in Pakistan that Sabine recounted in her Support work in working-class neighborhoods of Faisalabad, in the Punjab region of PakistanThanks to this rapper performance, we all joined in the dance, while drawing symbols on the mural painted by Yara as part of a performance also dedicated to the water being killed in the planet's rivers, lakes, and seas.

    We concluded each day with a harvest moment, where the popular narrative of Blessed Mixture, formed by young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Our America, helped us celebrate what we heard and shared through symbols, songs, and rituals. The guiding figures were the bees, a symbol of Mother Earth's resilience, which we welcomed with a wax candle produced by them, burning their flame in the palm of our hand to feel the pain of endangered species. This gesture was accompanied by a drop of honey poured into the other hand to give us a taste of their sweetness as survivors.

    Then came the little house of Acteal, which was placed in the center of the circle of participants to remind us of the martyrdom of some human bees. pacifist collective of Las Abejas linked to the Zapatista bases, opting for the path of active non-violence in their shared struggle with justice and dignity for the indigenous peoples, suffered the murder of 45 of its members, among them four pregnant women, who were massacred on December 22, 1997 in Chiapas in the community hermitage while they were praying for peace, a crime perpetrated by paramilitaries with the complicity of the federal army (Acteal Massacre, Chiapas. Serious human rights violations by the Mexican State in 1997). His memory continues to sting like a splinter that hurts the lives of the indigenous peoples who seek other possible worlds.

    We closed those moments of harvest by making kites with messages of peace for women violated by patriarchy and for the Palestinian people resisting the ongoing genocide by the Israeli state. These artifacts helped us direct our hearts and gaze toward a future with dignity and hope for the people in resistance.

     

    ∂

     

    The visit to the community of El Salto, in the suburbs of Guadalajara, led us to cross the abysmal line of the ongoing ecocide that the environmental collective that received us on the “Tour of Horror” (A Leap of Life) describes itself as “an industrial paradise with an environmental hell.” The Lerma-Santiago River basin, which runs 708 kilometers across western Mexico, is an open wound for Mexican territory and for the animal and plant species and people who inhabit it. Since the post-war industrial boom of the last century, polluting industry has spread across this vast region like a social and environmental virus. To date, more than 90 highly toxic pollutants have been identified, many of them carcinogenic, of which only a few, more visible, are treated with a couple of treatment plants. Sofía and Pedro, young environmentalists from the area, tell us that the transnational corporations established in this basin, such as Nestlé, Toyota, IBM, and many others, claim to be green companies today, when in reality, their local parts suppliers are the ones producing the most pollution because they do not comply with current national and international regulations.15 transnational corporations pollute the Santiago River, according to an international report.). ITESO is part of a network of universities in the region that study the water problem (Industry and nature in conflict: will there be a
    future for water in Lerma-Chapala?) in constant collaboration with the collectives of residents and environmentalists who seek to save the watershed with its inhabitants of diverse species.

    Among the members of the group welcoming us is Emmanuel, a little boy of barely ten years old. Wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, he leads his mother's hand as they show us the polluted wetlands, filled with the fetid odor of the city's sewage and the invasive species that inhabit them, such as tilapia, a contaminated fish sold in many markets across the country. The ecological present for this little boy from Guadalajara is catastrophic, but a possible future is beginning to emerge with community organizing.

     

    ∂

     

    One of the morning rituals was presided over by Cecelia Firethunder, a Lakota grandmother who told us about her people's long journey of healing their wounds in resistance in the United States. Her experience as a child in a sunflower field that welcomed her in a dance of dignity and strength when she faced discrimination at school has continued to inspire her ever since, as she accompanies her people in awakening from centuries-old segregation, to heal their wounded memories by recovering their language, their knowledge, and their ancestral rituals. It is then possible to walk forward creating new ways of eating, like the initiative shared by her compatriot Nick Hernández to recover lands and methods of communal organization and indigenous Lakota agriculture (Makoce. Agricultural Development) in the heart of the Indian reservations, which have been territories controlled by the US government for two hundred and fifty years.

     

    ∂

     

    From the compost that is rotten, the flower can emerge, as Lídia Pujol said.

    But for that moment to arrive in our time of environmental collapse, it is necessary to first recycle the waste produced by extractive, racist, and patriarchal capitalism to recover the organic essence of the resistance of communities of survivors, including Mother Earth.

    At the end of the meeting, we each returned to our places of origin and life choices, certain that as long as there is resistance, there will be hope, because there, in the midst of catastrophe, the lilies of re-existence sprout.

     

     

    Guadalajara, September 28, 2025

English
Spanish English