User:Daask/sandbox/José Porfirio Miranda

José Porfirio Miranda de la Parra, was born in Monterrey, Mexico, on September 15, 1924, and died on October 9, 2001 of lung cancer in Mexico City. He was a Mexican theologian, Hegelian philosopher, and Marxist biblical interpreter.

Early years
His first name (José) is the same of his father, his second name (Porfirio) stems from the fact that on the day of his birth is celebrated the day of Saint Porphyry.

Firstborn son of José González Arce Miranda Quentin and Maria Eugenia de la Parra Irigoyen, so Miranda was his paternal surname and de la Parra his maternal surname. When Miranda was born, his father was a manager of a bank branch in Monterrey. When the bank went bankrupt, the family faced financial difficulties. This period was also marked by religious persecution.

In 1926, the family returned to Mexico City, where Miranda's father was hired by the National Bank of Mexico, an institution he worked for the rest of his life. In the following years her two brothers and her five sisters were born.

In 1934, the family moved to Torreón, where his father was appointed as manager of the bank branch.

In 1937, after Miranda completed primary studies, the three brothers were sent to pursue studies at East Institute of Puebla, a Jesuit college in Puebla City.

In 1939, a secondary school, the Instituto Francés de la Laguna, was opened in Gómez Palacio, Durango, a city adjacent to Torreón by the De La Salle Brothers. This allowed the three brothers to continue their studies living in their parents' home. .

As Jesuit
In 1940, Miranda returned to Mexico City to study as a novice at the Apostolic College of the Society of Jesus in Tacubaya.

In 1941, due to religious persecution, the novitiate moved to El Paso, Texas (Isleta High School), where Miranda continued his studies. It was at this time that he fell in love with classical music, especially for the work of Johannes Brahms, a passion that would last throughout his life.

At that time he also awakened his passion for philosophy, together with a deep religious fervor. Various controversies arise with teachers, who wanted mere listeners of their philosophical discourses, not independent thinkers.

In 1950, after completing his studies in philosophy, he began teaching at the Guadalajara Institute of Sciences, an institution run by the Jesuits.

On October 17, 1953, on the occasion of the death of his father, he declared his purpose in effectively extending the Kingdom of Christ. At that time I was studying theology at the Pontifical Biblical Institute of the Pontifical Gregorian University. That year he also set out to write about Immanuel Kant and the existence of God.

In 1954, he began to write notebooks that he calls "occurrences" that are meditations associated with daily occurrences, personal reflections or comments on readings. The meditations focused on conduct in the Kingdom of Jesus, the nature of this kingdom of justice and love, and obstacles to its realization.

Between 1955 and 1956 he continued his studies of theology at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt.

He was ordained a priest on Saint Ignatius of Loyola's feast day on 31 July 1956, in Azpeitia, northern Spain.

On his return to Mexico, he was displeased with the conformism of the Society of Jesus in that country.

Between 1959 and 1960, he returned to Europe to study economics at the University of Muenster in Munich, Germany. At the time, he had special admiration for Oswald Melbroing economic advisor to Konrad Adenauer. At that time he was influenced by thinkers such as Wolf Erich Kellner, Karl Rahner, Jacques Maritain, Ernest Bloch, Roger Garaudy, and Herbert Marcuse, in addition to a thorough study of the complete works of Karl Marx in his original nineteenth-century German text.

Back in Mexico, he started working at the Faculty of Management and Business of the Technological Institute of Advanced Studies of the West (ITESO) in Guadalajara. At that time he was appointed as ecclesiastical adviser to the employers' centers. After making inquiries for the workers resulted in resistance from businessmen, he began to organize the workers of that city, inspired by the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. This activity generated conflicts that forced him to leave the city.

This attitude brought problems for Miranda, to the point that no place in the Jesuit Province of Mexico wanted to receive him because of his preferential option for the poor, in a time prior to the 1968 Conference of Latin American Bishops held in Medellín, Colombia.

Amidst this challenge, he was sent to Chihuahua, where he taught ethics and philosophy between 1961 and 1964, seeking to motivate students to commit to social justice. While there, he supported the struggles of the workers of the Authentic Labor Front in that city and influenced young people who were beginning to leave the Christian Democrat Social Movement. On the other hand, the Bishop of Chihuahua reproved his activities and ordered him to leave the city in 24 hours.

After that, he spent a period of "exile" at his mother's house in Torreon. In June 1965, he published his first book, "Hunger and thirst for justice," inspired by Matthew 5: 6, which deals with the socio-economic reality of Mexico together with an exposition on Catholic social teaching.

He was again sent to Europe to obtain a doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. These studies resulted in a thesis entitled "Marx and the Bible", presented in 1968, which argued that Marx's ideals of social justice were Judeo-Christian in origin, generated much controversy and was not approved by his superior.

His stay in Rome allowed him to have influence over the governing body of the Society of Jesus. In July 1966, Miranda was one one of three representatives of Pedro Arrupe, Superior General of the Jesuits, at a meeting of the superiors of the Jesuit provinces of Latin America gathered in Lima. Those gathered at this meeting decided to form the "Center for Research and Social Action in Latin America". He urged the Jesuits to adopt official positions in response to social problems in Latin America, which resulted in a document sent to Pedro Arrupe.

Pedro Arrupe, responded to the request of the Latin American provincials by means of a Charter in December 1966. Arrupe was dependent upon, albeit indirectly, on help of Miranda in the elaboration of this document. This Charter was a forerunner of the document approved in the 1968 Medelín conference, which declared the "Preferential Option for the Poor".

In 1969, due to the rejection of "Marx and the Bible," he presented a new doctoral thesis entitled "El Ser y el Mesías," an exegetical study of the writings of St. John the Evangelist, which was approved. He began to teach at the Institute of Philosophy and Sciences directed by the Jesuits in San Angel.

In 1971, with the support of Bishop Samuel Ruiz of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, he published "Changing Structure", which contains reflections on the relationship between the demands of the Gospel and the sociological categories of Marx.

A God concerned with social justice
Miranda was inspired by the legal and prophetic traditions of Israel contained in the Old Testament, as understood by interpreters such as Gerhard Johannes Botterweck, Wilhelm Rudolph, Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg, and Hans-Joachim Kraus. Through these writings, Miranda came to associate God with compassion, kindness, the right and the duty to do justice to all the poor and needy of the earth (see ).

In this sense, it also relied on the teachings of Paul of Tarsus, which, cf. , would have identified structural sin based on structural injustice as a denial of faith.

Miranda also maintained that the idea of the Creator God of all things would have secondary importance in Hebrew theology, for it would not be present in Yahweh's description of himself. The idea of a creator God would be presented at the beginning of the Bible for chronological reasons and not for the importance of this aspect of divinity. It is an idea that would have arisen outside the Hebrew tradition. The Yahweh of the Hebrew tradition would be a God who intervenes in history to correct his course, being presented in Chapters 4 and 18 of the Book of Exodus, simply as the "God of Exodus" (Exodus 4: and Exodus 18: 1).

Jesus would have chosen for the poor, cf. .

As a layman
On December 25, 1971, he decided to leave the Jesuits and the priesthood.

In 1972, he worked for a short time on a literacy project in Zihuatanejo and moved to Nezahualcoyotl. In that year he also published: "Marx and the Bible."

In 1973, "El Ser y el Mesías" and "Marx in Mexico" were published. In that year he began to teach Philosophy of Law at the Faculty of Law of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with a critical stance on legal positivism.

"Appeal to Reason: Science and Critical Theory of Positivism" in 1983.

In 1974, begins philosophy to teach in the recently founded Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, that year began to have contact with the ideas of Thomas Kuhn.

In 1978, he published "The Christianity of Marx ".

In 1979, he married Maria Adela Oliveros Maqueo.

In 1981, he published "Communism in the Bible" his last work of theological character.

In 1988, he published "Hegel Had Reason", later reedited like "The Revolution of Reason ". In this work he demonstrated that the philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel would have provided theses of crucial importance to humanity, which would resist positivism and skepticism. This work was contrary to the belief in the empirical origin of concepts, which Locke and his followers inherited from the scholastics.

Between 1991, it begins to study the ideas of Hosle Vittorio.

In 1993, he published "The Farce Called Skepticism", "Indigenism Against Human Rights" and "What to do before modernity? ".

In 1995, he was declared a "Distinguished Professor" of the Iztapalapa campus of the "Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana".

In 1996, he published "Racionalidad y Democracia", which is considered the synthesis of his entire work, in which he argued that materialism and skepticism are the main enemies of democracy. He also criticized John Rawls and argued that only the concept of justice could help us solve the problems of today's world.

In 1999, he published "Anthropology and Indigenism ".

In 2000, he published several articles criticizing secular education. .

Published works

 * "Hunger and thirst for justice" (1965).
 * "Changing Structure (Immorality of Western Morality)" (1971)
 * Translated as
 * Republished as
 * Translated as
 * Reprinted as
 * "Rationality and Democracy" (1996).
 * Translated as
 * Reprinted as
 * "Rationality and Democracy" (1996).
 * "Rationality and Democracy" (1996).
 * "Rationality and Democracy" (1996).
 * "Rationality and Democracy" (1996).