Tag: Pope Leo XIV

Candido Portinari | UN War and Peace | Oil on wood panel | Brazil 1957

From the end of times to the time of the end On the collapse of modern certainties and the sprouts of life amidst the rubble

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The 81st UN General Assembly, which began last Tuesday in New York, has shown that the ship built by the world's governments after the collective trauma of World War II is adrift. Trump's cynicism in addressing the leaders of the international community with the arrogance of a declining emperor, threatening Iran with total destruction, and speaking of the American continent as if it were his own territory, foreshadows nothing but a delirious wave of military, financial, and media violence on a global scale. We also witnessed the perverse spectacle offered by Benjamin Netanyahu, amidst protests from many delegations who walked out of the main hall as an act of repudiation while the Israeli prime minister attempted to speak. This demonic figure, accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, addressed himself and his henchmen to justify the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, sustained by the complicity of companies in the military and digital warfare industries that now treat the world as their spoils.

The voices of presidents who maintain a living sense of international law—such as those of Brazil, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, and France, with the suspicious and unfortunate absence of the Mexican president—revealed the decline of this international forum, incapable of upholding the commitments of modern international law. This ethical and political ideal laid its foundations at the beginning of modern colonialism, with the cry of the Dominican friar Antón de Montesinos in 1511 on the island of Ayiti, named La Española by the colonizers: “Are these not men?” referring to the conquered indigenous peoples. This outcry was later promoted by the School of Salamanca as the Law of Nations, a precursor to modern international law, through the thinking of another Dominican, Friar Francisco de Vitoria, and other professors at the University of Salamanca.

But what has happened to cause humanity's modern attempts to collapse? Several voices in investigative journalism and the economic and social sciences attribute the current civilizational crisis to the devastating power of modern industrial capitalism, later transformed into financial capitalism and now disguised as digital extractive capitalism, which, with the global war industry and the unprecedented apparatus of Artificial Intelligence, already controls the entire world. Other voices in the humanities attribute the cause to the colonial model undertaken by the West from the end of the 15th century as an expansionist enterprise of settlements, controlling lands, knowledge, and "souls," as the Afro-Brazilian theologian Silvia Regina de Lima Silba puts it, by the modern conquering subject who acted according to the maxim of colonial politics: "conquiro ergo sum" or "I conquer, therefore I am," which Enrique Dussel proposed as an axiom of modern coloniality.

From our perspective, without denying all the factors that have produced the civilizational crisis we face today, following the thread gleaned by Ivan Illich in the tangle of machine society—unraveled in the Mexican context by Jean Robert, Sylvia Marcos, and Gustavo Esteva—there is a fundamental cause of the crisis that we can call “spiritual,” as Javier Sicilia emphasizes in his writings, following Illich the theologian. It is a matter of understanding the global crisis as a “crisis of theological meaning” because modern societies, including religions and Christian churches, have lost sight of the incarnation of the divine Word as the source of humanity, that is, of closeness to human beings and to the creatures of the cosmos. “From the corruption of the best, the worst was born,” according to the medieval maxim taken up by Illich.

Indeed, technoscientific modernity created mechanisms of governance to control subjectivities and populations, transforming us into subsystems of a larger system: the welfare state. This system, with its tools such as schools, hospitals, prisons, and religion, subjugates peoples for the sake of the power of extractive control elites. Therefore, "proximity" to others became subordinated to vicarious powers, to which we all delegated charity as the supreme act of human virtue to mediating institutions like sacrificial religion and the welfare state.

It is therefore important to remember here that the return to the “mystical” or spiritual refuge of the individual and of peoples – with its expressions of historical strength that animates the victims and as the power of the poor and excluded who rebel against systemic violence – is the only ethical and political compass we have as humanity in this time of global uncertainty.

The collapse of the modern international system is giving way to global barbarism, with the unprecedented power of the “warlord” elites, as Pope Leo XIV called them, who govern the world. The Silicon Valley magnates, funding the greedy governments of the North and South—as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor detail in their recent book, “End-Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” which we discussed in the previous post—will continue buying territories, devastating ecosystems, corrupting governments, and eliminating peoples who resist the genocides and ecocides perpetrated by their complicit governments for the benefit of the digital military industry.

But the resistance in the cracks of those walls—the resistance that preserves, reinvents, and creates other ways of life in every liberated body, inhabited place, and autonomous territory—is what will keep us standing as humanity. In these experiences of other ways of life beats “the time of the end,” that is, the spark of life that confronts death and connects us to the source of Life. In the midst of the “end times” imposed by today’s powerful, people and communities in re-existence sow life like seeds of messianic time, in which the new world come from God beats.

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In the coming days, in Arequipa, Peru, thanks to the hospitality of Belissa and her community in resistance, we will share seeds of those other worlds born from mutual spiritual and theological accompaniment. This is the journey that, for the past eleven years, a group of us who find ourselves at the crossroads of spirituality and social activism have undertaken, drawing nourishment from the power of the Ruah that animates diverse rebellions against necropower, and that illuminates the combative hope of those who say “no more” to the logic of death, beginning to live, in the here and now, “the end times.”.

Lima, September 26, 2026

September 26, 2026
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

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