Category: Geopolitics and spirituality

The Spirit connecting the peripheries

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

Since the end of the last century, humanity's religions have updated their mission, realizing the growing poverty and injustice in the world, accompanied by wars promoted by corrupt leaders, where religion was used as a weapon of exclusion and violence.

The Parliament of the World's Religions with the project of a global ethic (Toward a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration) where the contribution of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng stood out, or the Earth Charter Promoted by, among others, the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, along with several spiritual leaders, they sounded the alarm to mobilize religions to stop the spiral of hatred that is spreading across the planet, turning to the sources of human interiority that religions have cultivated for millennia as a source of peace.

However, many of these initiatives, while they managed to raise awareness among their leaders and communities as well as in the media of the urgent task of building peace with justice and truth, did not always listen to the knowledge and spirituality of people and communities in their daily struggles to defend human life, rivers, forests and mineral, plant and animal species that inhabit the face of the earth but are threatened by the sixth mass extinction underway (What is the sixth mass extinction and what can we do about it?).

Second and third generation liberation theologies, as we have already analyzed in the Mexican context (Liberation Theology in Mexico: Creative Reception of the Second Vatican Council), have shifted the perspective by placing the victims of global violence themselves at the center as "knowers," that is, experts in humanity thanks to the resilience that has transformed into resistance. Above all, it must be emphasized that, from this experience of vulnerability, these survivors have recognized themselves as privileged interlocutors of Divinity. Indeed, the victims seek to re-exist with new modes of communal organization, agroecological work, and diverse spiritualities. These practices emerge precisely from the people and communities themselves who are threatened by systems of domination.

Feminist ecotheology, developed by Ivonne Gebara (Ecofeminism: A Latin American Perspective) in Brazil and Marilú Rojas (The relevance of ecofeminist theology and its political impact on current femicide and ecocide) in Mexico, took a radical turn in thinking about the interconnections between the faith of excluded women, their violated bodies and territories, as well as their ancestral knowledge of care and resistance as the beginning of a world change where a new face of divine Sophia is revealed.

Thus, an increasingly clear awareness emerged among religions and social movements to listen to those who live on the peripheries of the world of wealth and privilege, to explore how "another world is possible" from those social and religious margins.

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Since 2015, a group of university students, along with artists and social movements in defense of the territory in Mexico – with the advice of Gustavo Esteva (Center for Intercultural Meetings and Dialogues) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos with his Conversations of the World With several authors from the epistemic South such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui – we began to explore ways to decolonize the university and learn to “weave voices for the common home” (Weaving voices). Thus, we learned the demands of attentive listening to those living on the peripheries, who are not only victims but individuals and collectives who create processes of awakening, healing, and embodying together, and thus weave together knowledge that expresses their ways of life, community organization, and their profound spirituality of life.

In 2019, we continued this path by analyzing various voices of decolonial theology at a conference (Congress on resistance and spiritualities) organized jointly by the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, the international journal of theology Concilium, and the Dominican University Cultural Center of Mexico to explore together the common features of resistance to systemic violence and the spiritualities that arise from it.

In 2023, a group of university colleagues, with the support of Mexican civil society organizations and ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara in Mexico, managed to bring together more than thirty groups from Latin America (Re-Exists! The spirit crossing peripheries) with the aim of understanding the new forms of life, subjectivity, and communality that individuals and communities of survivors are weaving together. We sought a way to glimpse hope amidst the horror of clandestine graves in Mexico, discrimination based on gender, race, and social status, the devastation of Mother Earth, as well as to explore the rituals that emerge from these practices of resistance. graphic memory of that congress, with his documentary that includes some interviews, can give an idea of what we experienced at that meeting.

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Now comes the time for the next phase of Re-exist that will emphasize the connections survivors make and the strength that animates them.

This time, it is a meeting-festival with two novel and challenging features: interculturality as a way of existence and thought, to "rethink as a species," according to the call of the scientific community, closely linked to interreligious dialogue as the only viable way to approach the sacred.

We propose to explore together the paths of re-existence in this hour of collapse of the modern civilizational model, where the genocide in Gaza has put humanity in jeopardy and becomes a touchstone for human civilization.

Through three steps we will explore the wake up in the face of the horror that each collective has faced. We will continue analyzing the heal as personal and collective actions of memory, truth and justice that allow victims to rebuild their lives. Then we will be able to access the moment of support each other with new forms of communality.

Collectives of women from India facing patriarchal violence in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian religions will enter into mutual accompaniment with mothers of the disappeared in Mexico. Caretakers of Mother Earth from the Jesuit mission of Bachajón in Chiapas will dialogue with leaders of the Lakota people who work on collective memory to heal from the colonial past, while recovering their ancestral forms of agriculture through traditional diets, the cultivation of local plants, and the rediscovery of rituals such as the Inipi or ritual bathing which is a creation of communality, or the buffalo dance as one of the main symbols of the sacredness of earth and sky.

Stay tuned on social media Re-exists 2025 where brief informative capsules, interviews, and graphic memories of these moments will be published, which we hope will be like glimpses of life that resists and re-exists, because the strength of the survivors is animated by the divine Ruah that flutters over chaos to bring forth life in the midst of death.

Guadalajara, September 20, 2025

September 20, 2025
“Paroxysm,” Iván Gardea, etching, Cuernavaca, 2019

The monstrosity of religion On an ongoing modern debate

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This week I was invited to the presentation in Cuernavaca of a book that contains a failed conversation between John Milbank, a British Anglican theologian, and Slavo Žižek, a Slovenian atheist philosopher, about the monstrosity of Christ (The monstrosity of Christ: paradox or dialectic?). The Spanish translation was published by the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, at the initiative of Ángel Méndez Montoya, as part of an innovative publishing program to offer readers in Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world current theological debates surrounding God as an ontological problem, as a source of ethical meaning in a modern civilization shaken to its foundations, and as a political problem.

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Before attending the presentation at the Miguel Salinas Gallery Library of the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, located in the historic center of the city in an old house restored as a cultural center, I had the fortune of talking with the Juarez artist Iván Gardea, when visiting his exhibition at the Borda Garden which is open to the public until the end of September.

Maestro Gardea, in addition to being an impressive engraver in the most rigorous Mexican tradition of printmaking that dates back to Posadas and the Taller de Gráfica Colectiva a century ago, is a born thinker, well-versed in literature, music, philosophy, and theology. We met in his studio six years ago to prepare for the exhibition of his series of prints on violence inspired by the thought of René Girard. We held this exhibition at the Andrea Pozzo Gallery of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 2019, on the occasion of the international conference "Resist! Violence, Resistance, and Spiritualities," organized jointly by the Jesuit university and the International Journal of Theology Concilium, where I had the opportunity to serve on the board of directors and editorial board for eight years.

During our conversation in the bright colonial courtyard of the Jardín Borda, Iván told me stories about his ongoing artwork, a series of prints specifically about the monstrosity of the sacred in today's society, lost between Western liberalism, "devoid of any belief," and the materialistic atheisms that abound in both academic and social circles. In Iván's opinion, although I correctly interpret it, this monstrosity has many facets, among them nihilism as a way of life without hope. I was greatly surprised to hear his reflections, since that same afternoon we were to discuss the "monstrosity" of Christ in the Žižek-Milbank debate.

So I briefly summarized the ideas I would later express regarding that book, alternating with my beloved colleagues Sylvia Marcos, a renowned gender anthropologist in Mesoamerica who met Žižek in Slovenia; Ángel Méndez, a queer theologian who worked on his doctoral thesis on the theology of food under Milbank's supervision; and Nicolás Panotto, an Argentine Protestant theologian with whom I share projects in the "Theology After Gaza" group convened two years ago by Mitri Raheb to rethink political theology.

In the cloister of the Borda Garden, I commented to Iván that, in my opinion, the monstrosity that was important to discern today was that of the religion that perverts the sacred, expressed as Jewish and Christian Zionism, associated with far-right movements around the world that, in the name of God, not only pervert the Bible in their theology of election and promise, but also incite genocidal violence by manipulating the religious sentiment of entire communities. Another example is the case of televangelist Paula White in the White House advising Trump, his vice president Vince, and Secretary of State Rubio in a crusade to bring their country "back to Christian values."

Another emblematic example of the monstrosity of religion within religious institutions are the criminal cases of manipulation of religion by corrupt leaders, creating financial empires based on boundless ambition and controlling the dormant masses. This phenomenon has produced corruption among political, social, and religious elites in various parts of the world, accompanied by sexual and spiritual abuse, and the trafficking of political and financial privileges by perverse religious figures such as Marcial Maciel and Naasón García in Mexico, Fernando Karadima in Chile, and the leaders of the Sodalicio in Peru.

This monstrosity of religion is what matters most to analyze from a critical perspective in order to contribute to dismantling its power networks in society. It is urgent to do so through investigative journalism like that of Emiliano Ruiz Parra (Emiliano Ruiz Parra: HBO series, massive vehicle for the demystification of Marcial Maciel), of truth commissions such as the one proposed by then-candidate Borič in Chile (which, incidentally, was never implemented), to ensure accountability to society as an obligation of the secular state and, above all, to guarantee restorative justice for victims.

Ivan called these religious groups of today a parody of religion and, at the same time, another version of modernity that is collapsing in our times.

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Inspired by this fascinating conversation, I decided to share my thoughts at the book launch at the event organized by the UAEM School of Psychology, in conjunction with the Jean Robert and Sylvia Marcos Double Legacy Chair. I summarize what I presented at that discussion.

The first thing was to underline the importance of approaching the book as a theological provocation from our Latin American and Caribbean context, so that it is possible to make a critical reading of the European authors of the book, closely following their argumentation and highlighting other intercultural perspectives of approaching the mysterion of the real that religions call God.

Then, it is worth remembering that the meaning of Christ for humanity in times of civilizational collapse that we are experiencing today seems an irrelevant issue in the face of the exponential increase in violence under a new figure that some call, following René Girard, the "escalation to the extremes of the annihilation of the other." It does not seem relevant to discuss a religious figure who was trapped by a religion that domesticated his universal love. It seems even less important to get lost in the debate between a Slovenian philosopher and a British theologian when we find ourselves in the midst of the desolation of wars of genocide in Gaza, of extermination in Congo and South Sudan, of forced disappearances in Mexico, where the urgent thing is to stop the spiral of hatred if we wish to speak of the ethos political and spiritual possible for humanity in this uncertain hour.

And it is precisely here that the question of the experience of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century CE, facing hatred in his own body, may be relevant to us today.

Academic debates often stray into the realm of ideas, no matter how grounded they may be. Defending or accusing Hegel of various solutions to the dialectic of history to justify theological materialism, as Žižek does, or promoting Milbank's radical orthodoxy as a guardian of the City of God, seem secondary when it comes to confronting another monstrosity, one that has many heads, like the one of hatred and death produced by the capitalist, patriarchal, and white, Western hegemonic hydra.

Even defending or accusing Meister Eckhart - or better yet the former Dominican friar Rainer Schürmann (The Principle of Anarchy: Heidegger and the Question of Action), one of its modern interpreters, often cited by Žižek, for his interpretation of the negativity of divine being as the antecedent of the moment of negativity of the Hegelian dialectic seems like straw when the priority is to think about the negativity of those who inhabit “the region of non-being,” as Fanon said, and are being reduced to nothing.

I then proposed a decolonial approach to the book The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or DialecticA scholarly book that will generate much ink in the academic world, whether to validate Žižek's theological agnosticism or to confirm Milbank's theological philosophy. The crucial question the book poses lies in the impasse of reason in the face of the mystery of being. However, what is worth exploring is a different ontological approach, one that conceives of "being that ages and dies," as Levinas said.

To do so, it is necessary to turn to the Bible as the original source of this understanding of the paradox of being, and then to apophatic philosophy to spell out the intelligibility of the absurd when Christianity announces a "crucified Messiah" as the meaning of history. Following this route, it will be possible to cross the abyss to think about the monstrosity of being, but as the radiance of the messianic moment in which history seems to open like a recess of "hope against all hope" through "the wounds that heal."

Thus, another way of speaking about the critical link between philosophy, theology and politics emerges, not as an idea or as potestas politics, but as a messianic knot, that is, resistance to violence woven by those who live in “the shadows of the shadows of the shadows.”

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"By his wounds we shall be healed," says the oxymoron from the book of Isaiah (53:5), written by a disciple of the prophet during his people's exile in Babylon. This is perhaps the pinnacle of Old Testament revelation and one of the most radical truths about the human condition, politics, and hope. It is in this light, of course, that the torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman authorities, in complicity with the authorities of the Temple of Jerusalem and the enraged mob, will be read centuries later.

Exile was a spiritual and theological place for the disciple of the prophet, as it was for John the Baptist and so many prophets throughout history, "whose voice cries in the wilderness" (John 1:23). Until we reach the voice of Munther Isaac in the 2021 Christmas sermon in Bethlehem, Palestine. The Babylonian exile signified a contradiction for the expatriated people: on the one hand, the pain of being torn from their homeland; on the other, the recognition that they have only been able to live off the crumbs of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king. And yet, in the four poems preserved in the Book of Isaiah, the true source of life will be the disciple-people. Babylonian power crushed Davidic power. But the people survived by virtue of their fidelity to the first covenant, if not all, at least a few. Tzadikkim or just people in history. And so, that suffering people is the source of "another way of being," beyond the essence of Babylonian power, in the power of those who resist. They are the servant of Yhwh.

Following this spark from the anonymous disciple of Isaiah, we can then reread the history of "the cursed of the earth," yesterday and today. In particular, the history of the Palestinian people, who, in the depths of their pain from the genocide they suffered, allow us all to heal from their wounds if we open our lives and actions to this cry. A slogan of the Global Sumud Flotilla says precisely this: "They wanted to erase Palestine, and now Palestine sails all the seas."

Faced with the monstrosity of the exile in Babylon, the Hebrew people of the anawin, from the poor of God, brings forth the beauty of Sumud or resistance to the catastrophe that has befallen them.

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What dialectic of history in the Hegelian reading recreated by Žižek governs history? That of opposites that annihilate each other in search of a supposed synthesis of Aufhebung or overcoming this rivalry that only prolongs the death throes of humanity with the triumph of the executioners.

Nor is the philosophy of the City of God, yearned for by John Milbank as a return to theocracy, overcoming the narrow limits of modern autonomy that became a nightmare, capable of crossing the abysmal line that separates privilege from desolation.

Are both authors in this fictitious dialogue right in raising the alternative between the dialectic of Holy Saturday that annihilates the weak in the Sheol and the paradox of Easter Sunday, which is announced as the triumph of the victims over the executioners?

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Neither paradox nor dialectic, but messianic contraction of the being that ages and dies.

Eckhart warned us about figures and idols (deitas) that replace the ineffable God (diuinitas). They can be religious or political idols. What is crucial in the life of the Spirit is, therefore, for the German Dominican, detachment (Gellasenheit) as a form of apophatic or negative, non-dialectical negation of the impersonations of Divinity.

Pseudo-Dionysius had previously explored this path of overcoming the ego, giving rise to the experience of the Mothers and Fathers of the desert in their confrontation with the demons before arriving at the contemplation of the mysterion of the living God.

Therefore, today, apophatic theology is a companion to the political theory of the commons, proposed by collectives and subjectivities located on the peripheries of the hegemonic world, but rooted in the world of the vital connection between the human, the cosmic, and the divine.

By listening to the outcry, indignation, and hope of today's most vulnerable, we can then access the apparent monstrosity of Christ, which then becomes the beauty of the forgotten who re-exist when they say enough to the violence of the imperial being that kills.

Puebla, September 14, 2025

September 14, 2025
Sliman Mansour, Temporary escape, 2018

On leisure and silence in difficult times

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

One of the advantages of being retired from academic life now is having free time that flows by day, like a trickle of water that runs down the mountain and becomes a stream until one day it becomes a river.

The uncertainty of seeing time pass at the beginning of a new stage in life can be uncomfortable because it is accompanied by questions about the purpose of life, especially of each day. I no longer have to prepare the night before to have the next day's course updated, with the necessary teaching materials and the attire to wear for the classroom ritual. Time is measured in advance, minute by minute, in the time that will later pass in the classroom to ensure efficiency and the success of the program, as happened in my last years of teaching in Boston.

Now I finally have time to think, read, and write. However, the ideas flow with astonishing slowness at times, suddenly untimely in the early morning.

I no longer have to worry about having my PowerPoint presentation ready with clear ideas, essential quotes, and suggestive images to literally “capture” the attention of students, who were increasingly distracted by the virtual world and demanding the services of the “instructor.” Although they called me “teacher” when addressing me ceremoniously, they were actually demanding duties worthy of a gym instructor. It's no coincidence that this is what the experts in school education called us: “instructors.” This teaching service was an expectation that made itself felt with all its weight in the hundreds of emails each month that had to be answered to clarify questions about classes, authors, and assignments; or to send reports to school services requesting information on how we were handling students with mental illnesses, depression, syndromes I had never heard of, as well as special attention to people with motor, visual, or hearing disabilities. As never before in my thirty years of teaching, the most recurring problem to address in Boston College, It was depression, associated with anxiety, particularly during periods of midterm exams and especially finals.

And now that I no longer have to live with the urge to jump between the classroom and the cubicle, time stretches out and deflates, with the impression of not moving anymore.

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There are other new activities in this "retirement" stage. Not because I'm always filled with joy, although there are certainly moments of great joy, but because I have to relearn how to live with time. I usually wake up early in the morning as before, but now without rushing, leisurely enjoying the time to meditate in silence and set off for my morning walk. I continue the day with the ritual of espresso and the latest news on the internet, checking a diary while I savor my coffee, which fortunately is no longer filled with appointments one after another. Now there's enough space and time to "do nothing." Which means I have to get down to the task of taste those hours of the day in the leisure.

I fondly remember the classes of Father Ángel Melcón, a noted Thomist philosopher who was our formator during the Dominican novitiate in Agua Viva at the foot of the volcanoes. He insisted, following the Desert Fathers like Evagrius Ponticus, on the importance of re-educating ourselves during this time of initiation to move from "negotium" to "otium," as a countercultural act because business denies leisure. Thus, he invited us to discover, as novices, the time of pause in life, of silence, of learning to do nothing.

Today we value similar teachings from the “desert mothers and fathers” (The Apophthegms of the Mothers and Fathers of the Desert), as the spiritual sources of early Christian monastic life in North Africa and the Middle East are known in theology, with its aphorisms or sayings of spiritual wisdom that express the ancient practice of leisure. Business is the worldly hustle and bustle that prevents the silence and contemplation that are precisely the substance of leisure, allowing us to live in inner freedom, confront evil and practice good.

But how difficult it is to practice this art again, after decades of academic and religious activity. This "second novitiate" will be useful to me as a watershed to enter a new stage of life in the leisure of contemplation, now located in the silence of being and its shadows.

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Sara del Carmen, a dear reader friend from Coyoacán, gave me the novel a few days ago The Spinoza enigma Written by Irvin D. Yalom, the Stanford psychiatrist. I placed it on my desk for when I finished reading another novel which is the third part of the saga that began with The cathedral of the sea, written by the famous Spanish lawyer Ildefonso Falcones, following the story of an Aragonese soldier and aristocrat in Naples in the 14th century (In Love and War. The Cathedral of the Sea 3). While this novel fascinated me for the way it recounted the wars and loves that gave rise to Latin Europe, which later undertook the conquest of the New World, moving on to the other novel connecting the life of a philosopher excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the 17th century with the traumas of Hitler's ideologue and his aversion to Jews in the midst of the Nazi regime, brought me to the heart of a question that today lacerates my conscience about the perversion of the Jewish and Christian religion turned into a weapon of war.

In recent years, the Palestinian question It has been deepening in my mind and heart like a cry of today's victims where questions about God, the world and myself arise with greater radicality that I cannot answer. Obviously the Jewish religion perverted by Zionism, both Christian and Jewish in our days, provokes in me a frank rejection because a century after the Shoah The Israeli state reproduces the same monstrosity, in the name of God and with the complicity of far-right Christian Zionism, to annihilate a brother Semitic people.

The leisure time I enjoy now allows me to tie up the loose ends of the emotions, ideas, and stories that have surfaced in my life over recent years, revealing their intimate connection. Spinoza suffered excommunication from his Jewish community in Amsterdam with an Epicurean ataraxia that helps me understand the vocation that other free thinkers have followed, with its reverberations in my own life and in those of us who live on the peripheries of systems.

The famous expression Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, proposed by Spinoza perhaps summarizes the daemon or modern genius that we urgently need to recover today. Boaventura de Sousa Santos told me this in a personal exchange, when I invited him to write an article on God as a critique of the Cartesian idea, which unfortunately could not be published in the issue of the magazine Concilium Divine Providence: Beyond the Paradigm of Omnipotence because it had already been shared on the network (The end of the confinement of the Cartesian God). The excesses of religion have made God a transcendent being, as an omnipotent imperial substance associated with the powers of this world, when in reality he is immanent to the world, Spinoza argued. Pantheism in the eyes of the inquisitors of yesterday and today. “Pan-en-theism” as a philosophical current that runs through the history of the West, as described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But according to the most daring theologians and mystics of the Christian tradition, such as Meister Eckhart, Teilhard and Panikkar, what we call today “pan-en-theism” is in reality what they perceived and thought as the unity of reality that arises because everything real is theological core. That is to say, all reality is imbued with “the improvident divine providence,” as the French philosopher Emmanuel Falque says in the aforementioned issue of the magazine Concilium that I had to prepare.

What does Spinoza's God have to do with the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people? Perhaps this catastrophe, unpunished to this day, is supposed to be justified precisely by the idea of a God. religious who chooses a people, to give it a land and becomes his Warrior defender. Nothing could be further from reason, the excommunicated Jew would say. An idol that is not God, the apophatic mystics would say. And nothing could be further from the faith in the Messiah who comes as a gift to redeem the world from hatred, according to the radical vision of Jesus in Galilee and his itinerant community.

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Leisure in this new stage of life opens up a new perspective for exploring my own faith as a silence amidst the rubble of modernity. And thus, I learn to distinguish true religion, which is the contemplation of superabundant Love, which is not a being as an object, but the source of being that animates and sustains everything, and, in extreme cases, those who live in the shadows of non-being.

However, to access this world of mysterion divine, cosmic and human, it is necessary to dismantle the pseudo-divine avatars that with destructive force control minds, institutions and ritual practices full of arrogance, fear and violent segregation of what is different.

I cannot forget the main lesson I learned from my stay in South Africa last summer, which will serve as a beacon for years to come: the invitation to cultivate the ability to listen to the cries, whispers, and screams of those who dwell in the shadows of non-being, which is like an anticipated death. And even less do I wish to forget the most unexpected and hopeful thing that emerges in this desert of desolation: the knowledge of the peoples who resist violence as provocations of those lives that return from death, summoning us all. Ancestors. Remnants. Survivors. Their silence is the most eloquent language of the human, the cosmic, and the divine, to contemplate in leisure time and walk with them.

Making room for leisure requires silence. An experience of the suspension of the senses, like an implosion of appearances that gives way to the appearance of true faces. And with that silence emerges the eloquence of the gaze, the power of the caress, the rebellion of the liberated body, the hope of those who have left us but live on in divine memory.

In the “tough times” to come, as Teresa of Avila said, I am preparing to go beyond the business from life in the university and in the temple, even in the public square and social networks.

Inhabiting everyday reality differently, in the cracks and silences, mine and others', some murmur of life will rise to heaven. From the cracked earth and from the rubble of the collapsing world and from my shattered ego, a radiance of being appears.

Mexico City, August 30, 2025

August 30, 2025

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