THREE PERSPECTIVES

I. Liberating Spiritualities: An Intellectual Montage

A symposium on Christopher Tirres’s Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas was hosted by Santa Clara University in March 2025. The lively, thought-provoking exchange before a diverse gathering of faculty, academic researchers, students, and pastoral staff, centered on the trajectories and critical proposals of Tirres’s book, as well as its praxical potential to respond to the signs of the times. The discussion was guided by the question: How can spirituality serve as a catalyst for social transformation and healing in an age of darkness and despair? As one of two respondents in a panel—the other respondent was Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, SJ, Dean of Santa Clara University Jesuit School of Theology—the following is based on my critical response to Tirres’s book.

In 1929, the great Russian director and film scholar Sergei Eisenstein theorized the editing strategy known as intellectual montage; in gist, this involved the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated cinematographic shots or images to form new synthesized meaning. The power of the intellectual montage lies in the contrast and collision of the said images, which produce unconventional analogies and provoke critical thinking. I thought it apropos to refer to a piece from my previous research focus in film to begin to describe the project of Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas.

Akin to a talented filmmaker employing intellectual montage, Tirres juxtaposes the work of six twentieth-century liberationist thinkers with pragmatic thought, causing apparently divergent perspectives to collide and correlate simultaneously, thus producing an expanded view of spirituality that resonates in the here and now. Evidently, the most vivid examples of contrast are José Carlos Mariátegui and Gloria Anzaldúa, who do not identify with a Christian frame of reference, let alone Christian spirituality. In an inclusive turn, Tirres is unperturbed by the paucity of inherited ways of understanding spirituality in the case of these two provocative thinkers. With a keen eye and a deft touch, he explores and identifies what could be described as “nodal points,” critical junctures that often fall below the radar of conventional trajectories, for a new synthesized meaning of spirituality. Of course, it is pragmatic insight, most especially drawn from the thought of John Dewey, that offers the key to Tirres’s project. As he notes, for pragmatism, “To fully understand the meaning of something, we must inquire into its function and its conceivable practical effects” (10). From this lens, spirituality is efficacious power that is immersed in the world with the intent of transforming it; this serves as a lynchpin for what Tirres terms “a critical theory of spirituality.”

As a systematic theologian, I could not help but note the resonances between a critical theory of spirituality and the praxically oriented conception of spirituality as proposed by the Flemish-born theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. Schillebeeckx speaks of the human story as a quest for full, authentic humanity, or the “humanum.”Footnote ¹ Constantly threatened by social injustice and various inequalities, the humanum is certainly not served on a silver platter; it is a dialectical reality, a noble goal to be sought after and struggled for in history. This calls for a socially engaged spirituality. Schillebeeckx describes such a spirituality as a political holiness that involves the triple initiatives of protest, praxis, and promise. While the quest for the humanum is often contested and marked by the barbarous excess of suffering, thus a “negative mis-experience,” the indignation over what is experienced as “not-God” is the key to the positive, liberative force within the experience of suffering; it becomes the very oil that inflames social engagement and a new praxis.Footnote ²

In my understanding, the quest for the humanum or full, authentic humanity and the praxical imperative toward social transformation form a golden thread that runs through Tirres’s incisive drill-down on spirituality in the works of the six liberationist thinkers. This is made specifically clear in the contribution of Paulo Freire, who, as Tirres points out, bears the philosophical fingerprints of Emmanuel Mounier and a personalism grounded on “humanizing humanity.” Freire contends, “The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for the critical discovery that both the oppressed and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.”Footnote ³ This is critically examined in the dialogical cadence of conscientization and co-intentionality. A similar anthropological conception undergirds the praxis of the late South African anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, who, drawing from the well of the traditional African philosophy of ubuntu, advocated for a spirituality of profound mutual interdependence grounded on a shared humanity. Both oppressor and oppressed are imbricated in the blueprint of humanity and the negative blueprint of dehumanization. This can be appreciated in his well-known admonishment, “Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.”

Beyond the traditional view of spirituality as a kind of cathedral in time, a circumscribed experience with theological moorings in a monolithic tradition, Tirres argues that spirituality is “a pervasive quality of human experience.”

Far from being a “conservative” effort, the intention of conserving or warehousing the key contributions of the six chosen liberationist thinkers, Tirres’s approach is “creative.” He causes their wisdom to speak anew to the shifting contours of the ongoing human story through a creative dialectic with pragmatic thought. In his classic work Models of Contextual Theology, my longtime colleague Stephen Bevans, SVD, proposes six methodological approaches to contextual theology of which one in particular helps clarify Tirres’s interdisciplinary engagement in his book. The synthetic model—synthetic in the sense of “synthesis” rather than “artifice”—draws from various perspectives to forge an honest, mutually critical, and mutually enriching dialogue. In Bevans’s words: “The basic method of the synthetic model is that of dialogue or conversation with the tradition, with the context, with the imperatives of praxis. Such dialogue or conversation is an art, demanding strong discipline, on the one hand, and immense creativity, on the other.”Footnote ⁴ Each of the chapters of Liberating Spiritualities affirms Tirres’s solid handle of his philosophical, theological, and historical bases, accompanied by a keen creative sense to interweave intellectual threads where connections are neither obvious nor predictable.

I draw attention to chapter 5, “Subversive Everyday Knowledge: Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s ‘Conscientized Cotidiano,’” which, in my purview, is a masterclass in methodological creativity and robustness, and, importantly, in contextual relevance. Tirres directs his attention to Isasi-Díaz’s feminist conception of “lo cotidiano,” the sphere of everyday life with all its messy sociopolitical contradictions, most especially in the experience of Hispanic women. In liberation theology’s primary focus on social analysis, this domain of experience had been left out of the soteriological equation; in other words, the transformative potential of liberation theology has not been brought closer to home. In view of this, Isasi-Díaz proposes a “conscientized cotidiano” as locus theologicus, a site and a source for prophetic-liberating critique of the unequal status quo and the discovery of its latent liberative potential. Unfortunately, as Tirres critically observes, Isasi-Díaz does not develop this thought further, prompting him to engage the work of Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, who proposes a holistic approach to everyday experience, and also the legacy of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry that includes the “creative imagination.” I do not need to reprise the fine detail of Tirres’s engagement here, but I wish to point out the virtuosity by which he keeps the hermeneutical pendulum swinging between the one pole of affirmation, to the other pole of critique, and back again. Tirres is never vague about his end point, but it is worth noting that the pendulous movement contributes greatly to breaking open the concept of conscientized cotidiano, shedding light on its meaningful layers, so that they find deep and meaningful liberative resonance. Conscientized cotidiano, as it were, is made to speak anew. I could think of no better way to characterize what Tirres achieved here than the words of Schillebeeckx when he asserts: “For the signs of the times do not speak, we must cause them to do so.”Footnote ⁵

But Tirres does not stop at a systematic employment of method. He assumes the role of compassionate observer to Isasi-Díaz’s inspirited life journey, entering into the “first horizon” of conscientized cotidiano as he looks into the wisdom Isasi-Diaz draws from the quotidian rhythms of her personal narrative, or in Karl Rahner’s phraseology, the “mysticism of everyday life.” Isasi-Díaz is at her most authentic best here, overcoming artificial dualisms created by dominant narratives and dogmatic expectations to find her water in the profound granular experiences of her personal journey. Tirres then articulates an integrative, hope-inspiring concluding reflection: “It is from the details of lo cotidiano that new forms of beauty and prophecy emerge. What she shares here is nothing less than a prophetic and mystical vision that emerges organically out of the ebb and flow of her own engaged, passionate, and beautiful life” (99).

As evinced clearly and eloquently in his work, Tirres identifies a critical principle: a spirituality that is meaningful and relevant for our times draws from life and must flow back into life. Liberation then rises on the horizon as a real possibility.

We live in a Christian reality of many disjunctions, one of which is the disjunction between professed religious affiliation and the concrete, lived expression of that profession. A critical theory of spirituality as proposed by Tirres, in its anthropological turn and its pragmatic criterion of “quality of life,” is a meaningful step toward addressing this disjunction.

Conversely, a further point to consider is a secularized conception of spirituality as human life ethically lived, and not so much as a faith response to what is believed to be the active pneumatic presence of God in the human story. Could it be that God may be driven too far back from center stage, as it were, so that spirituality loses its “spirit”? Might it be helpful to qualify that spirituality is necessarily anthropologically centered, but not anthropologically reduced? Or perhaps a “theological surplus” (an inclusive understanding of spirituality as “quality of life” without the presumption of faith in God or an object of faith, as evinced in Mariátegui) and a “theological proviso” (a God–human relational understanding where faith is the ground for spirituality) can be held in a creative, dialectical tension?Footnote ⁶ Admittedly, these questions arise from my personal-cum-academic commitments as a Catholic theologian.

To be sure, Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas takes us to another place of engagement with spirituality, and in doing so, opens a portal for new conversation.