Violence destroys lives.  One of the dangers violence poses to the survivors is violence’s capacity to destroy their awareness of women as imago Dei by inhibiting imagination and truncating their human openness to the mystical-political dimension of being human beings. This presentation takes the escalation of violence against brown women, particularly feminicide, to be a tragic untenable reality in our time.  In this presentation, I discuss that while violence inflicts severe wounds, nonetheless, resistance to violence in the form of public reinterpretations of Christian symbols and narratives can foster and encourage the development of a mystical-political dimension of life. 

Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Ph.D., is former President of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) and is the T. Marie Chilton Chair of Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University, where she has taught since 2019. She is a well-known international author of several books, articles, and chapter length publications in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese and French. Her scholarly work was recognized in 2024 when she received the Hearts on Fire Writer’s Award from the Loyola Institute for Spirituality, and in 2025 with the Elizondo Award from the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS).  She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in El Paso, Texas where her family still lives.