Luis Cruz Villalobos

Luis hales from Santiago, Chile and is an extraordinarily unique figure (a philosophical, poetic polymath of sorts that has somehow descended from a different dimension into medicine) with a PhD in Philosophy from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a poetic output of over 50 books, ongoing work in clinical psychology at the University of Talca in Chile focusing on “extreme trauma,” as well as a former Presbyterian pastor for 15 years, who served as the regional secretary for the Southern Cone of the Latin American Theological Fellowship.

Key books of his that relate to medicine and psychology are:

Cruz-Villalobos, Luis. (2020). Keys of Posttraumatic Coping. Resilience, Posttraumatic Growth, Religious Coping, and Second Corinthians. Indenpendently Academic (2020).

Of which more is said below and of which one review declared:

Religions are traditions of wisdom, reflecting on fundamental human experiences and offering sage advice on how to cope with life’s vicissitudes and how to find a connection to the sacred. It should be no surprise then that the Bible –one of the repertoires of such wisdom– is full of stories of trauma and healing. In this book, Luis Cruz-Villalobos engages with such Biblical stories, notably on the apostle Paul, and reads them with a psychological lens. The reader will glean new insights about the bible and old wisdom about trauma. A fascinating transdisciplinary endeavor!

-Dr. Ruard Ganzevoort, Dean of the Faculty of Theology, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Cruz-Villalobos, Luis. (2021). Posttraumatic Exegesis. Analysis of posttraumatic coping in Second Corinthians. Indenpendently Academic (2021).

Which writing he later summarized here that begins with his definition of suffering:

“Suffering has been defined as ‘the interpretation of pain.’ It is not the same as pain; it is pain that is incorporated into our emotional and historical matrix and enters our narrative, both personal and social, taking on a meaning of its own, for better or worse. How we write, read, reread, edit and reedit our own history of adversity or trauma greatly affects how we suffer from it”.

His personal experience of coping with trauma, he goes onto write, occurred in the prolonged illness and later death of his 9-month-old son, Maximiliano. “During the painful process” of his nine days at home then nine months in the hospital with failed surgery after failed surgery and failed treatment after failed treatment, he composed, Tormenta Crisol: Salmos Desde el Dolor (Crucible Storm: Psalms From the Pain). “Despite” his “training as a Presbyterian minister as well as clinical psychologist,” he “made use, almost exclusively” of his “profession as a poet to express and configure everything that this process implied, which he came to understand “as a crucible.” And out of the depths of pain, arose thanksgiving: “I thank God for His patience…I thank God for those who were close to our hearts…and almost without understanding the point of saying it, I thank my beloved Maxy.”

In the crucible of this experience, he was led outside himself to the person of Paul, as he “began to wonder how this man, who had gone through such extreme adversity, managed to remain steadfast and be a witness to so many generations of Christians.” As he immersed himself in the study of Paul;’s life, as set forth in his Second Letter to the Corinthians that articulates his “severe difficulties — beatings, stoning, shipwreck, sleeplessness and thirst, among others — and the way he understood and coped with them,” Dr. Cruz-Villalobos was ultimately led into a doctoral research project which formed the basis of his later publication, Keys of Posttraumatic Coping. Resilience, Posttraumatic Growth, Religious Coping, and Second Corinthians (mentioned at the opening). Here in this pain-laden process, he “identified 11 ‘coping keys’ in the Scriptural text.”

It was this publication that ultimately linked Luis to our project and we remain ever thankful for how these experiences—these fires that he endured—became a fire, not that destroyed, but a fire, a tormenting crucible, that refined him, and us together with him, into the image of our Suffering and Tormented and Crucified, and finally, Risen Savior.

Cruz-Villalobos, Luis (2021). Positive Coping with Trauma. A brief and complete review. Indenpendently Academic (2021).

Theory of Unhappiness. (Libros de Antipoesía). Indenpendently Academic (2021)

Also with an astonishing introduction,

We do not know for sure if this book was written in less time than it took to write this text which, as a prologue, wants and needs musicality to remain. Maybe it is because beauty has no end and our stubbornness makes us look for it, or maybe it is a whim, because books like this do not end at the end, but they begin. What we do know is that Luis Cruz-Villalobos is one of those writers who cannot write a single poem because he needs to write whole books. I do not say this because his poems are not pieces of craftsmanship or small organisms as complex as a space station or an ant, but because his creative capacity is not of this world. And what is from other worlds often makes us unhappy. And, as has always been known, unhappiness is but the other side of the coin called life. On the other side are the happy ones. I was saying that Luis Cruz-Villalobos is not from this world of poets that fight and move in search of a definitive poem. He is not of the race of those who sculpt until they die, until the marble is taken from their workshops while they sleep. It is not of those hunters who spend hours with their sights set on the place where their faith tells them that the defenseless prey will appear, maybe for a couple of seconds. He is the mammoth hunter, the one who comes out with a spear as weak as our bones in search of the meat by the ton. And he always arrives home with food. In his cave, they have never gone to sleep with an unhappy belly. Dedicated to the whole world and to the little gods –like Nicanor Parra–, this architectural complex called Theory of Unhappiness, and which, on the contrary, draws us to happiness as a landscape, is no other house than the embers that remain alive, hidden behind the gray of the coals, until the fire of the future. Perhaps that is all this theory is trying to tell us. Perhaps knowing that the fire hides –or sleeps, or rests– in the heart of the coals, of the mother or of our own heart, is enough to keep our unhappiness at the right temperature: so cold as to be happy and so hot as to make others happy. Here we speak of unhappiness but also of time, of questions to the dead, of bad and good poets, of a Roman emperor, of axioms, of our ancestor Alonso Quijano, of course of philosophy, of God, of how much would fit in our notebooks and our hands. Here, in Theory of Unhappiness, one speaks of what should be spoken of at schools, in parks, in fields, one speaks of life itself, as Cortázar said, defending himself. And it is these places, where we find life, where we shall have to stay and wait for death. But do not stand still and do nothing, because that, and only that, is the opposite to happiness. It says it well in one of the epigraphs of the book –those immortal verses of don Nicanor– and I say it well, now, on the point that poetry returns to give me warmth: Luis Cruz-Villalobos is there, so that silence does not grow crooked.

-Sergio Marentes (Prologue), Director General of Esturium, Director Literario de la Revista Virguliéresis, «Leader» of the Grupo Rostros Latinoamérica, and former editor of the Revista Literariedad, and the Revista Esteros. Founder and director of the poetic collective Regálate un poema.

And for a selection of his other publications in Spanish click here.

For works related to poetry, see the following:

Cruz-Villalobos, Luis (2022). Theological Poetry: Haikus to Heaven / Eroga Tau. The accused poet opens his wings / Pauper God. Theographies (Theopoetry). Indenpendently Academic (2022).

And see this section of our site which features recent English translations of his work.

It should be noted that within a year, this work is already in its second edition. The original edition began with a Foreword by noted philsopher, John D. Caputo, who wrote,

"The task of weak theology is to sustain the exposure of theology to the primal event by which it is called into words in the first place. So when Luis Cruz-Villalobos entitles his book Theological Poetry, when he sets about to bring the theological matter to poetic word, he is not engaged in a work of ornamentation. He has struck the deepest root and touched the most ancient nerve of theology, which is that theology is poetry before it is doctrine; that is world-creation before it is creed; that it is poiesis before it is hardened over into a logic; that it breathes the words of life and death, of suffering and joy, before it allows its words to succumb to the formularies of orthodoxy and its canons. Theology is song before it is the stuff of a summa or of the councils. That is why the New Testament describes itself not as istoria, a sober historical record of the past, an accurate representation of the facts of the matter, but as euvangelion, a glad message, good news proclaimed to the poor and the imprisoned, a proclamation of the year of the jubilee. A gospel is not a predicative discourse but a promissory one. The year of the jubilee is the fiftieth year, the year that follows seven times seven, where everything is forgiven and we start out all over again. Fifty is not a number to be counted, a calendar date to be calculated, but a hope, a prayer, a dream, a messianic expectation, a marker of what is to-come, a symbol of a promise, and the Scriptures are its song.

The figure of Jesus in the New Testament is the figure of the archi-poet of the kingdom of God, a teller of parables about mustard seeds and buried treasures and prodigal sons, all bent on imagining the future of the coming of the kingdom, of the way it will be when God rules, not human greed and violence. Jesus is a poet who poetizes the Kingdom, who imagines what it would be like to live otherwise, in a time in which the grip of the world as we know it is broken. Jesus imagines the world differently, divinely, when retribution is displaced by forgiveness, violence and oppression by mercy to the least among us, and war is upended by weak force of peace.

In theopoetics, the name of this book, the very idea of “theological poetry,” is a magnificent tautology, a saying of the same in which something other—tout autre—something startling, something inbreaking, breaks in upon the business as usual of the world and calls upon theology to recall its ancient task of imagining the world otherwise.”