Tag: Ivan Illich

Rebeca Morimoto Hishikawa | Digital Illustration | Lima, 2021

Vulnerabilis Humanitas On the glimmers in the cracks of being

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Last Thursday, the JobeLab collective —formed by friends and colleagues from the city to promote open conversations about issues that matter to the quality of life of diverse communities— brought us together at the La Madriguera bookstore, in the Guadalupe neighborhood of the city of Jobel, the indigenous name of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The topic brought together nearly fifty people from diverse generations, backgrounds, and interests, drawn from the world of social activism, academia, the Church, and the arts. The pretext was to propose various interpretations of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas," published on May 15th, the centenary of his predecessor Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum," or "On New Things," written when the Roman Catholic Church was grappling with the challenges of industrialization.

The fundamental question, however, was not merely technical or pastoral: it was a question about the very soul of our time. How can we safeguard the magnificence and vulnerability of humanity when machines promise efficiency, calculation, and memory without wounds? How can we recognize, amidst the digital dazzle, that our greatness lies not in becoming invulnerable, but in learning to inhabit fragility (vulnerabilis humanitas) as a place of encounter, discernment, and human-divine communion?

Today, digitalization has brought about an unprecedented cultural transformation. Data, algorithms, and prompts —those instructive teachers designed on databases— exert an omnipresent influence through our cell phones, tablets and computers that, as Abraham Mena commented, are applied with increasing sophistication to all spheres of social life: the economy, science, technology, the arts, sexuality, education and religion.

It is a “machine” that is not intelligent, argued Kathia Loyzaga, but one whose mechanisms we must learn to understand and manage: exploring its possibilities, recognizing its limitations, and always maintaining, as Leo XIV emphasized, the primacy of the human, with its creativity and unique talents as the image of God. This irreplaceable core is the human heart, which João Almeida reminded us is the center of the religious message of Christianity and other spiritual traditions of humanity. This reality of being in relation to others is part of our path to humanization and liberation, as Paulo Freire observed.

In addition to recognizing the opportunities that AI offers for the development of science and technology, with an immediate impact on our lives, we must also consider the risks posed by the misuse of this technology when it falls into the hands of governments, militaries, and transnational corporations that profit from machine learning for their own benefit.

When addressing the ethical dimension of AI, the topic I was assigned to discuss in the talk, I wanted to recall Ivan Illich's warning about the age of systems: a time when humans have become replaceable subsystems, at any moment, by robots and algorithmic decisions under the command of a "handful of oligarchs," as Pope Leo said on his recent trip to Cameroon, referring to the masters of Silicon Valley.

Magnificent and vulnerable humanity before the warlords

Pope Leo XIV's theoretical framework allows him to move with ease within a vision of the human person as a relational being, exploring the intricacies of subjectivity masterfully narrated by Saint Augustine sixteen hundred years ago in his theological works and in his monastic rule of life. From this perspective, Leo XIV speaks of the Intimacy of Humanity to praise "magnificent humanity," which has received from God the indelible mark of his love, while at the same time recognizing the limits it cannot transgress under penalty of becoming a source of moral chaos. Leo therefore emphasizes that, while humanity is "magnificent" because it is the image of divinity, it is also "vulnerable" because it is a finite creature: a subjectivity that explores its limits, recognizes them, and discovers them as a place of encounter with others, with the cosmos, and with God.

Some voices within the global theological community propose continuing to critically examine how to approach AI, while still acknowledging its potential benefits for humanity and the planet. One provocative voice is that of Paolo Gamberini, an Italian Jesuit philosopher, who envisions a papal encyclical on this topic within the theoretical framework of Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic Christ, the great 20th-century scientist and mystic. In his cosmology, humanity appears intimately linked to the evolution of species and the cosmos from the Christic Alpha, including new creatures—such as AI—all assumed by Divine Wisdom in the movement toward the Omega, where the total Christ will be all in all.

The discussion yielded diverse perspectives. For example, a young sculptor distanced himself from AI because, in his view, it cannot replace the human genius of artistic creation. Another voice came from a leader defending the Jobel wetlands, a land of reeds and waterways now threatened by real estate development, urban chaos, and the apathy of a population that pollutes its waterways with garbage, while the municipal government proves incapable of regulating the urban disorder. How can AI be a useful tool for urban planning that doesn't displace residents as active participants in caring for Mother Earth?

New discussions about AI are being organized in various forums: in schools throughout the city and in communities in Zinacantán, the neighboring city, where younger generations live with AI daily and often use it naively or indiscriminately. The goal is to generate collective reflection on how to "disarm" AI of its serious risks and dangers, and how to "recover the human element" in this new digital age for Indigenous peoples, mestizo communities, and multicultural cities. This is a shared task that urges us to promote the dignity of all human beings, along with the species with which we share this "place," where life flourishes in diverse ways, in new and surprising forms of "the vernacular"—that connection to the land so dear to Illich as a place of conviviality because only there do we flourish as individuals and as a human species in harmony with the vital environment that sustains us.

But the recovery of our humanity isn't decreed from a room, nor is it exhausted by the analysis of an encyclical. It needs to be embodied in connections, territories, shared memories, and small fires that withstand the wind. That's why, upon leaving the discussion, the question of AI began to resonate with other names: wetland, volcano, cabin, breath, community. There, in those cracks where life persists, resisting so much violence, reflection became a path to learning how to be different.

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In honor of Ivan Illich's legacy, and as part of the numerous events commemorating the centenary of his death, the JobeLab collective is organizing the presentation of the book "Hosting the World: Thinking with Ivan Illich Under One Common Roof" by Elías González and Carlos Tornel, next Saturday, July 18th, at 5 pm, at Belil Restaurant in our city. The authors will be present, and Irene Ragzzini, Fabio Ceballos, and I will offer commentary. It will undoubtedly be an opportunity to share valuable insights and reflect together on our local context.

From the algorithm to the campfire: the triangle-volcano and the magma

After my trip to the land of the volcanoes in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, which I recounted here last week, the echoes of my story resonated as far as Kerala, India, where Kochurani Abraham, a beloved feminist theologian, wrote to me with emotion about that shared yearning for a “Cosmic Home” where countless micro-planets and mini-stars can be lovingly cared for with the radiance of the divine Ruah. A hut-home that illuminates the path, like straw beginning to burn in the hollow of a fire already prepared by its inhabitants, who fan the flames with their breath and with the help of a “tlatecuinaltiani,” or palm-leaf blower in Nahuatl.

Echoes of mutual support also arrived from Oregon, with Juan Carlos and Carolina dreaming of a shared “place” where we can meet for periods of time, open to the embodied spirituality of the ancestral Peruvian Quechua in communion with the ancestral Mexican Andean highlands. And from Minnesota, in the Twin Cities, Laurel sent reminiscences of her time in Puebla and its northern highlands when she was an exchange student: a journey that later led her to El Salvador to walk with the Basic Ecclesial Communities of that sister Central American country. Other echoes also arrived from Soweto, Wallmapu, and Dakota, from friends with whom I have shared memorable moments of spirituality rooted in diverse sacred lands, with vernacular thought and artistic creation that allow us to always celebrate life on the borders of death.

For three decades, I have been weaving networks of thought, activism, and spirituality within the cracks of hegemonic worlds, alongside colleagues and comrades from diverse collectives and communities in resistance, where we learn to be. From this emerged processes such as Mutual Spiritual and Theological Accompaniment, which brings together around a hundred people each year in virtual homes facilitated by a chef, culminating in an annual retreat, either virtual or in person, visiting territories of resistance. Also born along this path are the Resiste/Re-existe festival-gatherings, with dozens of social movements from the epistemic South engaging in dialogue with academics and artists to strengthen our diverse spiritualities, our mutual solidarity, and our developing decolonial thought. And as the third vertex of the triangle, thought itself: the intersection of postmodern phenomenology, mimetic theory, decolonial thought and apophatic philosophy, enriched with new approaches thanks to an exciting generation of colleagues such as Cleusa Caldeira and Pedro Igor Leite da Silva in Brazil, Laurel Potter in the United States and El Salvador, Juan Carlos La Puente in Oregon and Peru, Juan Jesús Vázquez in Mexico, and Soledad del Villar, Valentina Nilo and Martín Aguilera in Chile.

As a collective of decolonial philosophical and theological thought, we will meet in March of next year in Cholula, Puebla, as the ancestral homeland of the volcano-triangle, to share intuitions, findings, and proposals for thought and life, with the aim of continuing to walk with our communities of belonging by choice in the construction of other possible worlds, encouraged by the incandescent magma of the divine Ruah in the cracks of being.

Jobel, July 11, 2026

July 12, 2026
Denilson Baniwa | Curumim, keeper of memories | Brazil, 2018

My blog's first birthday

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

One of the facets of the “deprofessionalized intellectual,” to use that expression beloved by Gustavo Esteva, after thirty years of academic life in my case, has consisted of exploring the territory of the blog. Discovering this inhospitable land has proven to be quite a challenge for a citizen of the so-called Generation of the Baby boomers or the post-war period.

This digital adventure has been a challenge for someone who comes from the digital prehistory. I was a child of the 1960s who grew up playing with Towi, small wooden pieces to build houses or animals, imagining stories of cowboys and Indians. My childhood was filled with racing games with tiny metal toy cars, the size of my palm, launched with precise flicks of my index finger to propel them along the edge of the cement sidewalk, circling the block of our house, located in the beautiful San Francisco neighborhood of Puebla. We would cover a perimeter of about a hundred meters, spending long hours with cousins and neighbors. Then came Meccano sets, building machines and bridges with metal pieces full of holes held together with screws. These moments alternated with races of go-karts, speeding down the sloping streets. No video game left its mark on my generation.

For schoolwork, the typewriter was our irreplaceable ally in middle and high school for submitting final projects. We would make carbon copies of our work on sheets of colored tissue paper, depending on the subject. Making a typing mistake was a real tragedy because we had to retype the entire page.

Years later, when I wrote my doctoral thesis in Freiburg, I was finally able to use an electric typewriter with a built-in proofreader, which seemed like a quantum leap compared to the mechanical Olivetti typewriters of my childhood and adolescence. But even then, when the rigorous thesis supervisor commented on the typed pages, submitted after many sleepless days and nights, the entire chapter had to be rewritten. The magic of the copy-paste of word processors that now save us hours and days of work with a single click.

Despite the great advantages of today's digital world, I now recall with nostalgia that heroism of academic writing from my childhood and youth, which tested us in the art of patience when writing, correcting, and preparing academic work carefully, at a pace of trial and error, in a parsimony that favored reflection and, sometimes, led us to collective hysteria.

The final binding of the typed work was the master touch that, for students with good financial resources, was done with ostentation by using the new thermal binding technology, finer and more elegant, to impress the professor.

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Suddenly, without realizing the qualitative leap into the digital world, I've been thrust into another inhospitable territory called Artificial Intelligence. A few years ago, some journalists and scientists were talking about the "Internet of Things," which seemed like a Gothic oracle brought into the digital world. All the technological devices designed with semiconductors and microchips were connected in a secret network in some digital cloud that seemed to float above our heads. That cloud perhaps represented something similar to what grandmothers imagined when they prayed to angelic choirs to protect us from heaven. The difference is that now that cloud is a threat because it stores our data in some center controlled by Google or Palantir, devastating the land and its population, but above all, leaving us unprotected against the global surveillance that terrified Pope Leo XIV.

In the world of philosophy, I recall that, at the beginning of the new millennium, Mariano Corbì, a Catalan Jesuit who did not like to be identified as a companion of Ignatius, spoke of “digital reason” as an alternative to “analog reason” that had dominated the West for thousands of years, predicting an ontological leap in cosmic and human relations that would have an immediate impact on a new way of living spirituality as “religion without religion”.

For his part, Ivan Illich, in his brilliant work "In the Vineyard of the Text," published in 1993, explored the birth of the West in terms of the technology of meaning production from the medieval book, following his great Parisian master, Hugh of Saint Victor, in his work "Didascalicon," as a metaphor for the argument that unfolds like a vineyard from the leaves of the text with its numerous glosses. Based on this intelligence of the text, Illich characterized the systems era that humanity entered with the digital technology of the end of the last millennium as a dangerous threshold of dehumanization.

But now artificial intelligence is growing and is here to stay as a data and communication control environment that, in its generative form, threatens to make decisions on its own, cross-referencing data and drawing conclusions, to inform decisions in the companies, governments, and militaries that depend on it to achieve the ultimate efficiency (if you'll pardon the expression) of their commercial and military objectives. We have much to learn, evaluate, and decide so that this new technology doesn't end up devouring us as a human species.

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A year ago, on June 1, 2025, I launched my blog as a virtual pathway to weave conversations with people and communities with whom I share friendship, aspirations, ideas, and ongoing initiatives to cultivate a more humane world in our own territories. The digital world now allows me to continue this dialogue with people from the Global South and North, with whom I have crossed paths at some point in my personal, academic, and pastoral life, from Mapuche and Dakota territories to South Africa, from Boston to Chiapas, from Pomerania to El Salvador, Brazil, and Peru.

With the support of Raquel, Sergio, and Fatima, talented colleagues from the Afink workshop and advisors in graphic and digital communication, as well as the critical eye of Eduardo Velasco as the portal's image advisor, I have been proposing a short text each week on current topics, with an emphasis on the human background, thought, spirituality, and social commitment to tell and weave stories of dignity and hope.

Reaching the milestone of a first year of weekly publications allows me to revisit the topics discussed—always accompanied by a decolonial art image or a photograph of my own taking from my travels—to express my gratitude for this collective learning, trusting that the conversation will continue so that we can mutually enrich each other with true words.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, June 29, 2026

June 29, 2026
Freepik | Digital art, AI-generated resource | 2026

AI: threat or partner? On the challenges of the digital world and the 500th anniversary of the Chiapas Open Air Movement

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

In recent days, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has gone viral on social media due to Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical letter. Ironically, in this age of systems—as Ivan Illich termed this new social paradigm that should be considered when analyzing the digital world—the pontiff's warnings have already been devoured by algorithms and accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook (for the older generation of the digital world). Memes of Pope Leo battling AI have flooded social media, such as the one of the pontiff with his staff firmly warning Palantir: "You shall not pass." And to top it all off, thousands, perhaps millions of people have used AI to create a summary of the encyclical, mostly out of curiosity, sometimes with the aim of criticizing the Pope or the power of the companies that produce and control it. A slow, personal reading of the encyclical letter would be worthwhile to analyze its content.

Without losing sight of the ethical critique and the international legal regulation that must be promoted for the production and use of AI, it seems to me that it is important to first realize that we are already immersed in that tangle of data driven by individual, corporate and governmental wills, with an ever-increasing “autonomy” of what was called years ago “the internet of things” (IoT)., Internet of ThingsThis network of digital data flow systems is here to stay, monitoring information circulating in the digital environment in an automated way within systems created by humans, but operating with increasing “autonomy” to generate new data and produce unprecedented social, commercial, scientific and cultural effects.

The dystopian science fiction series Black Mirror, Created in Great Britain in 2011, the series depicted fascinating and chilling episodes of a society controlled by technology, where the boundaries between human reality and the virtual world were so porous that they created apocalyptic scenarios. Fifteen years ago, this reality of the algorithm's power seemed like a figment of the imagination. Today, it's already part of our daily lives.

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I am currently preparing a couple of talks on AI. I will be giving the first one this week at the Diocesan House in San Cristóbal de Las Casas to a group of priests from Generations X and Y—both born after 1965, following the generation of the Baby boomers- until 1982 when the Millennials. Of course, this classification, proposed by British and Canadian colonial sociology to designate first a generation without a defined desire, and then the first generation of digital natives, is relevant for describing certain social strata in each country. But it also designates the other side of the coin of globalization, due to the technological impact that television and computers have had on the lives of all people.

Later, with the team of JobeLab We will hold a discussion on AI at the end of June in the Temple of Charity to reflect on the recent Encyclical Letter Magnificent Humanity by Pope Leo XIV, published last Monday, May 24th. We will approach this from an interdisciplinary perspective, first giving voice to colleagues in computer science, education, and philosophy. There, I will offer some reflections on the meaning theological of the problem in question, from a phenomenological and decolonial perspective, deepening an intuition present in the Encyclical Letter, human vulnerability, but unfortunately not developed sufficiently by Pope Leo.

There are many ecclesial, university, and social forums where we must open intelligent conversations, with creative imagination, to think together about the digital reality that has already reached us, with its enormous possibilities for the flow of information and its challenging scenarios of post-human control of production and knowledge processes that we have never imagined.

AI is perceived today as a threat, even though it's already part of our digital-age "customs and practices." Perhaps we should learn to coexist with it as a "creature," that is, as a reality marked by the finiteness of all creation and, therefore, incapable of supplanting our imagination and creativity—much less divine glory—though we must remain vigilant against the danger of its control over our lives and destinies. Today more than ever, the bastion mystical The human condition is presented more clearly as a source of freedom in times of AI.

500 OP Chiapas

This Thursday, June 4th, we begin the commemorative events for the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Dominican friars to Tierra Firme of the American continent, on June 23, 1526 in Villa Rica de la Veracruz, as the first anchor of European colonization and the arrival of the Gospel with its model of Western Christianity.

In Chiapas, the small community of Dominican friars in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, along with friends and colleagues, has prepared cultural and liturgical events to commemorate this historic event. We will begin on Thursday, June 4th, with a concert by the San Cristóbal de Las Casas Symphony Orchestra and Choir at the Santo Domingo Church, where this youth ensemble will perform works of Baroque and modern classical music, with interludes that will briefly recall the friars' arrival in these lands, their evangelizing mission, their heyday during the colonial period, and their subsequent decline in the 19th century, leading up to their gradual resurgence in the 20th century.

On Friday, June 5, an academic colloquium on the Dominicans' contribution to Chiapas culture will take place at the friars' former convent in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, now the Museum of the Highlands of Chiapas. Two historians specializing in Dominican architecture in Chiapas during the colonial period will participate. The event will also feature the presentation of Friar Pablo Iribarren's latest book on the Dominicans in the 20th century, focusing on their evangelization efforts in dialogue with the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. Marimba music by the Díaz Sisters will provide a festive atmosphere.

On Saturday, June 6th, the celebration will take place in Zinacantán, thanks to the generous collaboration of the faithful communities of the Parish of Saint Lawrence the Martyr. A solemn Mass of Thanksgiving at the Church of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, the parish seat, will be followed by the cultural event “Transfigurations: Mayan Spiritualities Today,” which I have had the honor of organizing along with two masters of contemporary Mayan art. We will begin with the unveiling of the mural 500 OP Chiapas, a masterful work by Antún Kojtom, a Tseltal artist from Tenejapa, depicting the encounter between the spiritual traditions of the Tsotsil people and other Mayan communities of the Highlands and Rainforest of Chiapas with the Dominican friars throughout history. Tsotsil poetry by Xun Betán and some of his students from the creative writing workshop, held this month in preparation for this event, will be accompanied by traditional Tsotsil music performed by musicians from the parish church. And in the afternoon, a talk about the Dominicans in Zinacantán will be given by Friar Pablo Iribarren, as a framework for a closing liturgical act in which young people from Zinacantán will make their initial promises as members of the Dominican Youth Movement.

And to conclude the commemorative events, on Sunday, June 7, with a Eucharist presided over by Don Rodrigo Aguilar, current bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the Dominican family and the faithful of the city will give thanks to the God of Life for this half-millennium of preaching, with its lights and shadows, invoking divine mercy to walk with hope as the people of God in the arduous times we are living through, to bear witness to the Gospel of liberation with justice and peace for all creatures of the cosmos.

We look forward to seeing you soon in Chiapas.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, May 31, 2026

May 31, 2026

English