Tag: Genocide in Gaza

Gabriel Pozo Menares | Mapuche Calendar | Wallmapu, 2011

Wallmapu News

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

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The light of dusk reaches Tirúa, in Mapuche lands, while Carlos, my Jesuit host who has been here for more than fifteen years (HistoriActiva Jesuit community of Tirúa), drives along the dirt road to visit friends who have opened their homes to share life in the area for years. We arrive and are greeted by the oldest daughter, along with her cats and dogs. She briefly interrupts the work she's preparing for her last semester of high school, as after graduation she plans to enroll in university to study teaching. Life goes on simply among the families who live here. Her father spent the day growing potatoes and then dedicated the afternoon to laying the floor of a new room in the house. They offer us mate as a ritual to accompany their conversation. Before leaving, the friends exchange bird food and make plans to recycle an old wooden door that will be installed in a budding eco-spirituality center.

Wallmapu (Declaration of the Department of History on the term Wallmapu) is the term that refers to the ancestral lands of the Mapuche people (The Indigenous World 2025: Chile). Today, they are dominated by the forestry industry, which has contaminated the territory with invasive species such as eucalyptus and pine to mass-produce cellulose for export to the global packaging market.

The Mapuche people today are divided between the frantic integration into the modern world of consumption on the one hand and, on the other, the defense of their territory, language, and traditional medicine under the leadership of Machi women, healers and spiritual ancestors.

On both sides of the mountain range, divided between Chile and Argentina, the Mapuche people fight for their territorial and cultural survival, in the face of the overwhelming inertia of the modern world (Chile: Resistance to the forestry model in Wallmapu, Mapuche territory). For communities assimilated into today's modern model, it seems better to eat processed foods than seaweed and shellfish as the ancients did; or to drink Coca-Cola instead of herbal teas because it gives them greater status; they prefer to be evangelical Christians or Roman Catholics rather than follow the spirituality and language of their ancestors. Ultimately, it is a matter of "integration" into the modern world, even at the price of cultural assimilation and environmental depredation, which, in its symbolic undertone, is violence against the ancestors and against Mother Earth.

Civil society networks such as “Churches and Mining”, or the initiatives for intercultural dialogue on ancient and modern astronomy promoted by some universities in the region, are modest attempts to accompany a people torn apart by internal contradictions between modernity and tradition.

Perhaps eco-spirituality is being an "articulation," among others of a more social and political nature, that allows for these intersections. Carlos told me the anecdote of a grandmother who, attending a workshop on traditional medicine and eco-spirituality, said she didn't understand anything about the intersections of the three bodies (personal, communal, and territorial) that the workshop presented, because she had been thinking throughout the entire meeting about the meaning of that strange word written on the invitation: "articulation." A term that the grandmother kept thinking about until she finally realized that it surely referred to the articulations of bones, when she felt something in her body was out of alignment, impeding her mobility and causing pain. So she concluded that the workshop was a path to healing her joints. And ultimately, that was the objective of the workshop! That grandmother had followed it in her own way, even though she was absent from the rest of the talks.

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Before arriving in Mapuche lands, I was able to speak with university students at two forums in Santiago, Chile. The first was about the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the fathers of liberation theology, on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death (Gustavo Gutiérrez International Congress). In a traditional academic format with keynote lectures and presentations, over the course of a couple of days a clearer awareness emerged among attendees about the importance of style Latin American to speak of God, intimately connected to the experience of the poor and oppressed. A wisdom that is already part of the way some Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian communities understand their faith in a liberating God and promote the transformative role of victims in their own liberation processes, leaving behind lands of slavery and embarking on paths of new life.

But we also began to see, not without some attendees' surprise, that it is necessary to open our hearts and our eyes to other exclusions, such as those experienced by women, queer/cuir people, undocumented migrants, relatives of missing persons, Afro-diasporic peoples, and indigenous peoples, to mention those who represent today's resistance to the violence that afflicts us in so many ways, with the Palestinian people today facing the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government and its accomplices at heart.

During the colloquium, several initiatives emerged to keep the memory of the great Peruvian theologian's work alive, through the work of the archives that house the recordings of the summer courses Gutiérrez offered in Lima for several years, a valuable resource that will reveal another angle of the author's thinking. Likewise, some of us proposed to investigate the relationship between Gustavo's thought and the work of Aníbal Quijano, his compatriot, who represents one of the most important sources of decolonial thought today, along with Frantz Fanon. The confluence of both thought styles, along with Black, feminist, queer/cuir and Palestinian liberation theology, will provide us with a more pertinent theoretical framework for understanding the intersectionality of violence and ongoing resistance in order to create alternative ways of life, governance, and spirituality that inspire communities located at the fractures of humanity.

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The other meeting, held with colleagues from the Chilean Society of Theology (UCSC hosted the Annual Conference of the Chilean Theological Society), was an opportunity to think together about possible paths to hope for communities facing systemic violence.

My contribution to that annual event brought to the table the question of thinking about hope from a perspective of "combative decoloniality," like the dignified rage practiced by the Zapatista communities, or the indignation of women who face sexual or spiritual abuse in their respective religions. Because, from my perspective, it's about dismantling a vision of hope as a flight from the world in anticipation of consolation in the afterlife of eternal life.

Rather, it's about discovering and strengthening the hope that "emerges" from the fractures of humanity. It's where survivors paddle against the current of the history of oppression and privilege, inhabiting the world with practices of mutual care, in the pedagogy of embodiment, and collective healing with memory, truth, and justice, as we explored at the recent Re-existe 2025 gathering.

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The sky of Wallmapu, with the crescent moon shining brightly, is today a living metaphor for the hope that surrounds us when we hear the heartbeat of the lands and stars of the South.

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Tirúa, October 25, 2025

October 25, 2025
Tings 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

October 19, 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

English