Category: Political theology

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
Alex Serpas | Re-exists: A Leap of Life | Acrylic paint on paper | El Salvador, 2025

From resistance to re-existence On the decolonial learnings of the last decade

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

I return to the story of the river of waters of life and thought that has been formed thanks to shared learning experiences with friends with whom I discover an inspiring way to live spirituality and to weave a theological and philosophical thought that is meaningful and mobilizing for the times we live in our era of global uncertainty.

Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment was the first stream that began to flow, irrigating the lands of my theological work, which I cultivated with people on the margins of society. I sought a spirituality of life that flourishes amidst the cracks of power, first in Mexico and the United States, then throughout the continent, and now reaching Europe and Africa. Thus, little by little, I explored spaces of great vitality, diverse spiritualities with their own theological knowledge outside the university, such as the public square, pastoral service, and social activism. These were spiritualities I had sensed since my youth, but which I now listened to with greater attention, both heart and mind.

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The other tributary of the valley of decolonial practices and knowledge was one I began to navigate with Pablo Reyna, Araceli Téllez, Eduardo Velasco, and several colleagues from the Ibero-American University of Mexico City more than a decade ago. It was during the time of the #YoSoy132 student movement, which rose up against the corruption of the Mexican political system; also during the protests over the forced disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students; and, later, during the #MeToo movement, ignited by feminist comrades in public squares around the world to dismantle the age-old patriarchy.

I joined the learning process to “decolonize the university,” to which David Fernández—who began his rectorship at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City inspired by the thought and martyrdom of his Jesuit colleague Ignacio Ellacuría of the Central American University of El Salvador, and advised by the sharp intellect of the great Mexican thinker Gustavo Esteva—had called us, from my position as an academic and administrator. In my capacity as Divisional Director of Humanities and Communication at Ibero Mexico City, I proposed holding a colloquium in 2016 called “For a Change of World,” where we invited students, faculty, researchers, administrative staff, and university service personnel to raise the most urgent social problems of our time and discuss ways to address them, considering their root causes as part of our university vocation, and making the crucial “epistemological” shift to learn from the knowledge of the peoples and social movements that creatively and hopefully confronted these forms of violence. The keynote address given by Leonardo Boff on the challenges of our time was memorable at that colloquium.

From that auspicious moment, a series of talks, workshops, and academic colloquia followed, each bringing together three diverse and complementary perspectives and analyses: social movements resisting various forms of violence; academics learning and researching alongside these movements; and artists' collectives creating performances, choreographies, music, paintings, sculptures, plays, and literature to tell and recreate the life stories emerging from the cracks of a violent world. Over time, it proved to be a fascinating formula, full of cognitive, social, cultural, and spiritual challenges, revealing itself as a specific path to "decolonizing" the university, thus opening it to other processes of knowledge and transformation of reality arising from the peripheries of the hegemonic world.

The 2017 colloquium “At the Crossroads of North and South” on the poetic and academic work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos was another memorable moment. Rappers, singing and dancing to the poetry of the Portuguese author's INKZ (Incapable) writing, interacted with Searching Mothers from Mexico and Argentina, with young women from the Community Guards of Cherán in Michoacán, and with healers from Bojayá in Colombia, healing the trauma of the massacre perpetrated by paramilitaries and the army, among many other experiences of victims turned survivors. In this way, we explored new paths of the “ecology of knowledges”—a barely explored territory that we will have to traverse in the years to come.

Later, the conference on decolonial theologies organized in 2019 by the international theology journal Concilium in Mexico City—a publishing initiative I was part of as an editorial advisor and later as a director, which kept the flame of the Second Vatican Council alive—in collaboration with the Ibero-American University and the Dominican Catholic University Center (CUC) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), brought together several of these threads into a master knot. An ecumenical prayer service in the Santo Domingo Church in Mexico City, co-led by a Dominican Catholic bishop and an Afro-Puerto Rican queer bishop, opened the event, which then brought together social movements from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina on the Santa Fe campus of the university. There, they engaged in inspiring conversations with investigative journalists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians in roundtables of mutual listening. Each day was accompanied by three-way discussions, following the format that had revealed to us a new model of university in its infancy. Other times we organize round tables with renowned figures, such as that extraordinary conversation between Rita Segato, Raúl Zibechi and Amador Fernández Savater about the spiritualities that animate resistances, a topic for the three figures outside of their usual reflections on critical theory that they agreed to explore, carried out at the CUC of the University Parish of the Dominicans, to close the event with provocative intuitions about “political hope”.

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Up until then, we called these conversations “Resist” until, in dialogue with Nelson Maldonado-Torres during a colloquium in Boston in the spring of 2022, I realized the need to name this deeper phase of the decolonization of life and thought with a new expression. It was crucial to focus on the “re-existences” created by Afro-diasporic peoples, women in their struggle against patriarchy, queer collectives, mothers searching for their missing children in Argentina and Mexico, collectives of people in forced migration, people with disabilities (or different abilities, depending on the desired emphasis) creating living spaces, and so many other communities in resistance that invent, day after day, new ways of life, communal organization, and spiritualities of Buen Vivir (Good Living).

Inspired by this intuition, together with Elías González and Juan Carlos La Puente, we organized two festival-meetings at ITESO in Guadalajara, both titled “Re-existe” (Re-exists), the first in 2023 and the second in 2025. Thanks to the vision of its rector, Alexander Zatyrka, and the creative imagination of a handful of theologians from Peru, Kenya, Nigeria, Catalonia, India, and Mexico, we were able to bring together eighty invited guests and hundreds of students and faculty at both events. The heart of both discussions and festivals beat with a focus on the spiritualities that sustain, with “combative hope,” the people and communities located on the fringes of the hegemonic world. Mining extractivism was analyzed in its connections to white supremacist racism and xenophobic immigration policies, with their strategies of ethnic cleansing and extermination focused on controlling territories and subjectivities through new settler colonialisms, such as those that gave rise to countries like the United States, South Africa, and Israel. There, we sought to unravel the processes of awakening, healing, and self-empowerment deployed by communities in resistance. Histories that, little by little, transform into re-existences.

The harvest of these wonderful encounters was also expressed as a celebratory ritual thanks to the support of Fran, Diego, Glenda, and Lau, popular educators from the Bendita Mezcla collective, formed by the younger generations of the Base Ecclesial Communities of Our America. And so, these conversations reached their aesthetic climax with the comic book talent of Katsumi Lemus, the rap and hip hop of the comrades from Psicolexia and Semillero 259 from Chiapas, the performances of the Portland, Oregon, artists' collective, the dancers of Jauja in the Andean highlands, and so many other people who create glimmers of beauty in the cracks of necropower.

We now dream of reuniting in Mother Africa in 2028, where we can honor the living memory of those peoples who teach us so much today about the power of their recovered ancestral heritage. Peoples who are living testaments to the creativity of the diaspora and the profound thought that arises from centuries-old wounds transformed into bodies and territories of dignity and hope, as in South Africa and Kenya, South Sudan and the Congo.

In the context of the great catastrophe (Nakba) that we face today—whether as “war against humanity” according to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, as genocide in Palestine denounced in its ideological apparatuses of Jewish and evangelical Zionism by Silvana Rabinovich and Mitri Raheb, or as technofascism throughout the world according to decolonial thought—these encounters are more urgent than ever to weave networks of mutual recognition and political hope, promoting a sharp analysis of the complexity of the catastrophe.

But perhaps the greatest challenge lies in sharing the initiatives for caring for territories and the processes of autonomy cultivated by many groups located in the cracks of the hegemonic world, where the life of the peoples is preserved and enhanced as a seed of hope for humanity and for the Common Home that welcomes us into its bosom.

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On this urgent topic, a book on decolonial political theology has been in the works for a year. It is a decolonial analysis because it arises from the cracks in necropower during the great catastrophe. But such an approach is insufficient if it is not enriched by the anthropological analysis of mimetic desire, which explains the violence within subjectivity in relation to the otherness of one's neighbor and the other God. This decolonial political theology remains open to ongoing critique thanks to the horizon of apophatic thought, which warns us against any usurpation of the divine. It is a collective work that I gradually developed, together with colleagues who participated in the colloquia I organized with the support of Martin, Matthew, and Francis, enthusiastic doctoral students at Boston College, during the five years I lived in Massachusetts. The New York-based publisher Orbis Books is the home that welcomes us for the publication of this work, where we will give an account of our feelings and thoughts of re-existence in times of necropower.

I will share more details about this book, which is in the final stage of the publishing process, in future posts.

Jobel, September 12, 2026

September 12, 2026
Carlos Mendoza | Carolino Building, Third Cloister Corridor | Puebla, 2026

Between Benin, Porto Alegre and Puebla On the World Social Forum and the public university of half a century ago

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The World Forum Theology and Liberation returns to the territory

A week has passed since the return from the lands of West Africa, still marked by the memory of modern slavery, with its back-and-forth diasporas, its wounds still open as a collective memory of a young, modern nation barely sixty years old. The Beninese people's attempt to proudly reclaim their ancestral Vodou religion, beyond the demonization it suffered at the hands of Western Christian missionaries for centuries, remains uncertain, as they now face political manipulation by their populist leaders. What is certain is that the Beninese people are now torn between a unique Western modernity and a return to their ancestral roots, a yearning that will take decades to explore.

Beninese theologians, for example, centered on their evangelical Christian identity that gives the Bible centrality as a key to interpreting life, are now asking themselves, listening to Silvia Regina de Lima Silva, a fellow member of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, about the devastating effects of “the coloniality of the soul” that must be recognized and confronted in order to give way to a “dialogue of knowledges” in their own bodies, minds and spiritual and thought practices for the liberation of subjectivities and imaginaries that unfold dignity and hope for the peoples of today.

In contrast, the Dominican friars of the West African province, from what I gathered in brief conversations with them, do not seem to grasp this horizon of decoloniality. In their community life and in their service to the youth of the young nation's capital through the university chaplaincy, they prioritize a model of African Christianity with a Western predominance in liturgy, thought, and moral life. It remains to be seen whether the new generations will be encouraged to explore this "dual belonging" to the faith in Christ and fidelity to the spirituality of their ancestors. In decolonial theology, we call this process the "interculturation" of Christianity with the ancestral knowledge of the peoples.

A telling sign of this country's current predicament is its economy, trapped in the still-persistent ties of French colonization, the strategic presence of the United States to neutralize the Soviet influence of decades past in the region, and the Chinese power that is encroaching upon the country with mining and resource extraction projects. Even after the devastation of French colonialism and the civil war that preceded the transition to democracy, the wealth of natural resources and the vitality of the Beninese people remain. But decolonial resistance in the Trump era is becoming increasingly arduous, as we witnessed in the tortuous organization of the World Social Forum, with pressure from authorities to reduce its impact on the Beninese people, neighboring communities, and, above all, on international public opinion.

In any case, the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, which brought together eighty colleagues from five continents, displayed surprising vitality, giving rise to a new generation of theologians from the Global South to continue walking alongside peoples resisting the systemic violence of extractive capitalism as a form of colonial power on a global scale. Regional gatherings and interdisciplinary, ecumenical, and interreligious reflection groups are on the horizon as commitments to strengthening the bonds of local communities in their territories. Confronting systemic violence requires communities of resistance on all fronts: ecological and spiritual, intellectual, and in the creation of socioeconomic and theological alternatives. In the years to come, we will explore the strength of these initiatives that yearn for a return to the “spirit of Porto Alegre.”.

The utopia of half a century ago in Puebla

In 1976, a generation of young people from Puebla began high school with great enthusiasm and aspirations for social change in Mexico. The Emiliano Zapata Popular Preparatory School of the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla embodied the vision of the university reform undertaken by engineer Luis Rivera Terrazas to give public universities social relevance for the political and cultural transformation of the country. The motto of that reform, "For a democratic, critical, and popular university," expressed the utopia of that generation. Public universities thus sought a new model of education, finding in Puebla, Sinaloa, and Guerrero the cultural and social context to launch initiatives. Years earlier, far-right groups, such as El Yunque in Puebla and El Muro in Mexico City, had attempted to seize control of university life, without success, with the acquiescence of the Catholic high clergy and business leaders who saw the shadow of atheistic communism looming over the country's public life.

Given the high demand for enrollment, preparatory schools were overwhelmed, and it became necessary to call upon young undergraduate and graduate students to volunteer as high school teachers, without a guaranteed salary, to meet this high demand for upper secondary education. This is how the popular preparatory schools in Puebla, such as Emiliano Zapata, Alfonso Calderón, and others, were born.

Without fully realizing the underlying national project at stake within the public university, I entered Prepa Zapata, assigned by lottery. The school was then located in the Carolino building, the former Jesuit Colegio del Espíritu Santo. I was assigned the morning shift, with classes from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Every morning I left at dawn to take the bus from my family home in the San Manuel neighborhood, near the University City, to the city center. I never imagined that high school, which at that time was a two-year program, would so radically shape my personal, professional, political, and spiritual life.

Group IV of the 1976-1978 Generation consisted of 70 restless young people, several of them sympathizers of the Communist Party, others militant Catholics, some from Catholic schools and others from families with a religious tradition, as in my case. Perhaps most of us had arrived by chance, but with the encouragement of our young teachers, we began to create an atmosphere of friendship, play, collective learning, and open discussion about the social issues that most concerned our generation. Looking back on those years, I see now that we were living through the times of the Dirty War waged by the PRI governments against guerrilla groups in many regions of the country that opposed a corrupt political system that, through union corporatism and perks for the government elites, was plundering the country. Barely eight years had passed since the 1968 student movement for democratic freedoms in the country, which left more than 300 students dead; and barely five years have passed since the repression of the "Corpus Christi Thursday" against students protesting the lack of autonomy at the University of Nuevo León that left 180 dead.

The more politically engaged members of our group raised these issues in philosophy, economics, and history classes, which we then continued in discussions in the third courtyard of the Carolino building and in gatherings with friends at a café or during marches in the street. The contentious topic of Catholicism as an ally of the system frequently came up, opening up the debate about the role of religion as the opiate of the masses or as a source of freedom. At that time, I couldn't yet grasp the impact of liberation theology, which was developing precisely then in Peru and Brazil, much less did I have any idea of what Ivan Illich was proposing in Cuernavaca—a radical Christianity that would later have an impact throughout the continent.

At the heart of our discussions, a deep affection grew, expressed through games, parties, cultural outings, and trips to concerts organized by the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, which brought the finest music, theater, and ballet companies from communist countries to Puebla. As part of this "cultural battle," local business leaders created their own festivals of great artistic quality. This resulted in a cultural education of exceptional aesthetic, political, and spiritual depth for those young generations of students.

The personal and professional calling of many of us was forged in that effervescent atmosphere of social awareness of injustice, of experiences of beauty as a creation of the human spirit, and of a passion for truth that arises from critical thinking. For some of us, there was also a spiritual undercurrent; the source from which all that passion flowed was the thirst for transcendence, where the human and the divine met.

In my life story, that was the fertile ground where the seed of God's Word fell, received in my family, rooted in the faith of post-Vatican II Catholicism and later cultivated in the Dominican style as a constant search for the saving truth. I'll tell you that story another time.

Puebla de los Ángeles y de Zaragoza, August 15, 2026

August 23, 2026

English