In July 2014, Christopher D. Tirres presented a paper at the first LatinaXo Studies Association Meeting in Chicago “On the Fraught Relationship between Latino/a Spirituality and Latino/a Religion.” Near the conclusion of this paper, Tirres spoke back to a terminological division that exists as “spiritual but not religious,” which has found Latine Studies scholars more inclined to ignore “religion” in favor of “spirituality” while Latine religion scholars tend to underemphasize “spirituality.”Footnote ⁷ Tirres’s remarks in 2014 intimated that both the “religious” and the “spiritual” may have more in common than suggested at first glance: those who are “religious” may challenge institutional structures more than initially presumed and those who identify as “spiritual” may find that they are more deeply networked within and shaped by institutions than they may initially claim.

Because I was so excited as an audience member to hear those arguments, when I picked up Liberating Spiritualities, I expected a book that intervened in the problem of what “religion” and “spirituality” are in Latin American and Latine contexts. Although this book does not follow that path in ways I expected, Liberating Spiritualities does challenge simplistic divides between the “religious” and “spiritual” by provoking a dialogue between six Latin American and US Latine thinkers who engage religion or spirituality. Drawing on Roger Haight, Tirres does not rigidly distinguish between religion and spirituality; instead, he favors the term “spirituality” as the more encompassing category (9). Rather than examine the increasing proportion of Latines who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” Tirres emphasizes a broader spiritual “quality” of experience that connects different figures.

By focusing on liberating spiritualities as ways of making meaning that are concerned with human (and sometimes other-than-human) emancipation and flourishing, Tirres complicates many US-focused studies of spirituality that have emphasized spirituality’s often individualistic, capitalistic, and imperial embeddedness.Footnote ⁸ Tirres describes a contrasting, if related formation, through his working definition of liberating spiritualities, particularly striking in the conclusion: “Spirituality emerges when human beings reconstruct and reorganize experience in ways that form a consistent pattern of habit and action that is measured by some ultimate concern. Spiritualities that are liberating take this definition one step further insofar as they also incorporate a critical consciousness that connects ultimate concern to acts of redressing systems of oppression and promoting human flourishing” (119).Footnote ⁹ This definition focuses on spirituality as action and practice, with only a minor attention to ultimate belief, but a substantive focus on communal ethics. Tirres frets that this definition may seem too “secular” to some because of its emphasis on practices for justice. Yet, importantly, his definition does not exclude belief but instead qualifies it as an embodied and embedded quality that defies majoritarian perspectives on spirituality as individually pietistic.

In his attention to “critical consciousness,” Tirres elaborates on existing studies of Latine spiritualities. Similarly, Edwin Aponte has emphasized that Latine spiritualities must be approached differently because they are often deeply embedded in and responsive to daily life and must be understood on terms other than individualistic or pietistic norms.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition to this grounding in the everyday, Tirres orients Latine spiritualities around decolonial epistemologies. As Theresa Delgadillo describes in her landmark examination of Chicana spirituality, art, and activism, Latina spiritualities have often been epistemologically rather than eschatologically oriented because of the emphasis on articulating a world of experience that cannot be neatly circumscribed by available categories and boundaries.Footnote ¹¹ Tirres similarly underscores spirituality as a world-changing (rather than only worldmaking) “form of critical intelligence” with pedagogical ramifications (110).

As a professor of undergraduates in the current moment, one who has been reading Karen Hao’s Empire of AI to try to understand how US companies have built and approach what they call “artificial intelligence,” I could not help but read Tirres’s elucidations of the epistemological principles of Latine spiritualities found in these six foundational Latin American and US Latine thinkers as offering a much-needed counter-construction of knowing and intelligence. Tirres depicts a form of knowledge-making that is contextually embedded and responsive, and he underscores intelligence as part of a process where knowledge is not a “thing” we can “possess” (12). Concluding with Brazilian ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara, Tirres particularly draws our attention to the import of “relatedness,” to the ways spirituality as epistemology is forged in complex and contextually particular networks of relations that incorporate human and other-than-human communities. Such ways of knowing are quite distinct from the aspirations for “intelligence” that Sam Altman and other US technology leaders gravitate toward.

Opening with an epigraph from Altman about his own desires to build something more than a company, “something closer to a religion,” Hao’s work depicts the imperial ambitions not only of Altman but of much of the US tech industry that forged AI.Footnote ¹² She shows how the particular AI models we have rely on assumptions of large-scale, resource-intensive design that presume knowledge gets made through projects of extraction and compression. By contrast, Tirres describes epistemological projects that cannot be reduced or compressed precisely because they respond to and are embedded in particular struggles for human flourishing, struggles that have generally responded to the undersides of empire rather than magnified imperial aspirations.Footnote ¹³ Even as each thinker he profiles has hopes for broad human/earth community flourishing, they also all offer intentionally specific, contextual, and contingent approaches to knowing that resist abstraction and require attention to messy and gritty details.

Tirres, shaped as he is by his own training and interests in US pragmatism, seeks connection between these Latin American and Latine spiritual epistemologies and other frameworks. In some ways, this extends some of his earlier work, and it helpfully demonstrates that within presumably hegemonic and imperial epistemologies, there have been important voices of dissent who have also emphasized how knowing can be radically contingent, socially embedded, and pluralistic (114–15). Nevertheless, I often found myself resisting some of these paths Tirres followed because I wondered about the paths he did not follow. Perhaps my struggles grow from my own training in the study of Christian Scriptures with an emphasis on minoritized and Latine critical turns that has brought me to these same six thinkers but led me to different questions and interlocutors when I read them. For instance, I noted in his discussion of Gloria Anzaldúa that, as important as notions of “healing” were to how we might understand spirituality as a decolonial response to colonialism’s wounds, some important Latine religious studies writings that addressed Anzaldúa’s and broader Chicane healing traditions were absent from his bibliography.Footnote ¹⁴ Anzaldúa is perhaps one of the most deeply cited and interpreted figures in US Latine scholarship, almost a scripture unto herself, and Tirres enhances interpretation of Anzaldúa’s views on spirituality by focusing more on her later work than her heavily studied Borderlands/La Frontera (1987).

My other struggle with the book is intertwined with a struggle I have in offering my own critical response. How do all of us who have been trained inside settler-colonial institutions learn to resist settler-colonial language in how we respond to others and try to articulate our own perspectives on knowing? US Latine theologies, as well as many minoritized critical projects, have taken daily life as a central locus for meaning-making and meaning-seeking; daily life here shapes our knowledge-making but also structures what we take knowing to entail. Ada-María Isasi-Díaz’s particular articulation of “lo cotidiano” as a revelatory formation has now informed multiple generations of scholars.Footnote ¹⁵ So how do we both depend upon her approach but also think differently out of the realities of “lo cotidiano” in our contemporary moment?

Tirres finds Isasi-Díaz’s discussion of “conscientized cotidiano … underdeveloped” even as he augments her ideas with the work of Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, whose work he likewise deems “incomplete” (90, 97). Given Isasi-Díaz’s contexts of study, I wonder why her thought, if underdeveloped, should not be read more closely with some of the interlocutors coming out of her graduate context in Union Theological Seminary in New York, particularly the scholarship of Black women, such as Katie Geneva Cannon, who similarly emphasized the alternate sources of revelation that Black women construct out of their own lived contexts.Footnote ¹⁶ Reading alongside Indigenous critiques of imperial epistemes as extractive and abstractive, I have become wary of describing scholarly projects from minoritized peoples as in need of “development,” a colonizing framework that early generations of liberation theologians responded to critically.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, it troubled me that Tirres almost pits two different women’s ideas against each other while suggesting they would be made more complete through the intervention of male and Euro-North American interlocutors (Dewey, in particular). Are there ways to interact with other scholars’ work, to forge important, bridging conversations between fields, without needing to “develop” or “complete” other scholars’ ideas?

For me, this point comes up largely because of how well Tirres describes ways of knowing and making meaning that are critical but also contextual, contingent, and aimed toward human and earth flourishing. Tirres’s work here provides such an important intervention against imperial epistemology and imperial religion, especially in a moment when tech-industrial extractivism and white supremacist Christian nationalism seem to dominate US religio-political imaginaries. Instead, Tirres reminds us that spirituality can be a deeply embedded fount of liberative imagination and praxis that resists dehumanization and compression.