A Review of Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas

As the director of a doctoral program in spirituality, colleagues and students often ask me if I have any recommendations for articles or books they should read. Because the field of spirituality is a new one in academia, fresh research is always emerging. This year, my number one recommendation is Chris Tirres’ new book, Liberating Spiritualities. I am enthusiastic about this text for several reasons, but chiefly because it represents the kind of genuinely interdisciplinary investigation that characterizes the best work in spirituality. Not only does the book insightfully examine previously overlooked Latinx sources with historical-contextual deftness, but it also offers a brand-new approach to the definition and understanding of spirituality itself.

Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas, by Christopher D. Tirres (New York: Fordham University Press, 2025. 177p.)

Tirres’ book explores how spirituality functions as an essential dimension of dynamic transformation in the work of six exemplary figures of 20th-century liberation thought from the Américas: the Peruvian Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (1921-1997), Mexican-American theologian Virgilio Elizondo (1935-2016), Chicana feminist and cultural anthropologist Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004), Cuban-American mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1943-2012) and the Brazilian ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara (1944-). These remarkable thinkers represent an impressive cross-section of the diverse and truly international aspects of liberation thought. Two of these thinkers are either professed atheists or non-believers, while the other four present as both believers and as fundamentally motivated by their faith (if not the concrete religions of their childhoods). Nevertheless, Tirres finds that all either explicitly or implicitly recognize the socially transformative power of human spirituality.

Tirres’ definition of spirituality embraces a decolonial approach that privileges those who find themselves on “the underside of modernity.” Two organizing principles stand out in this definition: the goal of human liberation and the starting point of human experience. For Tirres, spirituality constitutes a form of intelligence that helps us to reconstruct and transform experience in life-giving ways – not only to interpret what human spirituality is, but also to mobilize spirituality to help change the world. With this starting point in mind, Tirres gives three areas further consideration: the ongoing need for decolonial approaches to spirituality, the value of nurturing a pragmatic “ethos” and the utility of reconceptualizing liberating spiritualities as liberating forms of pedagogy/education.

With respect to the first area, decolonial spiritualities, a growing body of literature in decolonial thought helps us to see just how ensconced we all are, both historically and ideologically, within persistent logics of coloniality. Decolonial theory amplifies the important work of postcolonial criticism. However, whereas postcolonial criticism tends to lean on (European) postmodern theory, decolonial thought emphasizes the wisdom of thinkers from the Global South. Furthermore, whereas postcolonial theory largely takes as its historical point of departure nation-states gaining independence from European powers in the 20th century, decolonial thinkers tie their critique of modernity/coloniality to the so-called “discovery” of the New World and the logics of domination that subsequently emerged in the 16th century, which soon touched every corner of the globe.

The pressing question that develops for every sensitive student or theorist becomes: How, if at all, can we transcend—or at least minimize—this complete reliance on modernity/coloniality? Decolonial thought puts forward a variety of responses, including three general areas: historical analyses that offer genealogies of coloniality and modern-day racism; courageous forms of ideological deconstruction that call into question embedded logics of modernity/coloniality; and the creation of habits of “seeing” and “doing,” of theory and practice, that open up new (and/or recover forgotten) life-giving ways of being in the world. Now, more than ever, Tirres insists that we need to embark upon a bridge-building effort between intellectual traditions to make these responses effective. As Tirres convincingly argues, the postcolonial approach offers an important partner for Christian spirituality, especially in its core concern to understand human experience.

As for the second area of focus, a pragmatic ethos, Tirres turns to the philosophical tradition known as U.S. Pragmatism for help in interpreting liberating spiritualities across a multiplicity of intellectual traditions. U.S. Pragmatism emerged at the turn of the 20th century among scholars in a young republic who had politically broken free of Europe but remained intellectually beholden to it. These scholars (usually classified as philosophers, although their backgrounds and commitments range widely) sought to devise an intellectually rigorous system that reflected their unique context and experience of life. This collection of thinkers understood ideas in terms of their effects and met philosophical problems through their concrete impact on human experience. The broad intellectual project known as pragmatism thus came into its own in the United States in the 20th century, developing as both a cultural and theoretical force.

Bearing in mind this fundamental approach, Tirres seeks to focus on spirituality and religion less as institutionally rigid systems of belief and more as normal and organic human experience. By using a pragmatic lens, Tirres attends to how spirituality functions in our ongoing search for value and meaning. This focus on function invites us to think more deeply about what we mean by experience (a perennial question of metaphysics) and how we, as conscious and creative beings, actively generate meaning (a pivotal question of epistemology).

Accordingly, Tirres finds that the philosophical tradition of U.S. pragmatism (especially as articulated by John Dewey) has much to offer, not primarily in its theory of truth or even in its significance as a philosophical method, but rather in the overall sensibility, or ethos, that it engenders. This ethos views all knowledge as provisional and testable, welcomes a diversity of disciplinary perspectives and worldviews, and strives to utilize inquiry as a tool for social and ecological betterment. We can summarize the pragmatic ethos as a humble process of engaging pluralistic worldviews in a dialogue to search for meaning and make worthwhile commitments. It is this humble, sincere and generative approach that engenders the development of liberating spiritualities. While I wish that Tirres might have spent more time developing this pragmatic perspective by perhaps drawing on a few other foundational figures from the tradition of U.S Pragmatism (C.S. Peirce, Josiah Royce and Jane Addams come immediately to mind) I believe that he has provided a more than adequate and accessible account of Dewey’s method.

Regarding the book’s third area of consideration, spirituality as a critical pedagogy, Tirres asserts that Paulo Freire’s notion of conscientization (a process of developing a critical awareness of reality through reflection and action) clarifies the crucial practice-oriented dimension of liberating spiritualities. For Tirres, John Dewey’s attention to socially transformative forms of education also proves compatible with the “praxic” orientation of liberating spiritualities. Working with Freire and Dewey, Tirres asks: In what ways can human spirituality function as a critical form of education? Spirituality must extend well beyond the confines of classroom learning, as Freire insists in his rejection of a “banking model of education” and as Dewey indicates in his emphasis on the “reconstruction or reorganization of experience.” However, Freire and Dewey leave more to be said: Contemporary constructive-developmentalist approaches to education and religious formation can help us better understand precisely how deep-seated changes in thinking and praxis emerge in individuals and communities, Tirres observes.

After laying the groundwork for his innovative approach, Tirres then turns to the six representative thinkers mentioned above. He discerns in each figure an underlying or explicit reliance on a particular version of spirituality to explain their own liberative theories and praxis. Tirres holds that spirituality represents a constitutive dimension of what it means to be human; spirituality emerges when human beings reconstruct and reorganize experience in ways that form a consistent pattern of habit and action measured by an ultimate concern. Spiritualities that are liberating take this definition one step further by also incorporating a critical consciousness that connects ultimate concern to acts of redressing systems of oppression and promoting human flourishing. Tirres impressively points out how each of the six thinkers he studies brings forth a spirituality in the mode of liberation.

In summary, Tirres’ effective marshaling of both philosophical pragmatism and liberation theology provides an incisive account of the goal and method of the liberating spiritualities of the Américas. Tirres ably demonstrates how organic forms of spirituality and formal expressions of religion alike may be approached in non-dualistic, nonhierarchical and nonhegemonic ways. Additionally, liberating spiritualities chart a path forward for Christians to understand the thoughts and motivations of even non-religious persons and communities more deeply. In the end, one of the great strengths of Tirres’ book is his capacity to reach across various contexts and shed light on the creative, courageous and hopeful endeavors at play in each. Tirres makes evident how, in whatever way and whichever place they manifest, liberating spiritualities constitute intelligent modes of engaging with the world so as to center those on the periphery and redress unwarranted forms of human suffering.

I would highly recommend this book not only to those seeking to know more about spirituality but also to all those interested in liberationist thought, Latinx theology and its historical sources, pragmatic philosophy, decolonial criticism and cultural and contextual analysis. This book is well-written and accessible to non-experts and those studying across disciplines at all levels. Tirres has written a groundbreaking book of spirituality, certain to become part of every bibliography and recommended reading list in the field for years to come.

John J. Markey, Ph.D., is a professor of Theology and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Spirituality at Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio. He has written widely in the areas of spirituality, theology and U.S. pragmatism and his newest book, co-authored with Michael Ceragoli, is Revisioning Spirituality: Human Transformation and the Communal Imagination.

A Review of The Brazil Chronicles

En los 80s