Rafael Luévano

Rafael Luévano did not immediately recognize that the claim that was being laid upon him that morning at his breakfast table in 1993 when he read a brief newspaper account chroncling the discovery of women’s dead bodies on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. But these were merely the first of hundreds of murders to follow, a horrific phenomenon that the priest and professor would spend the better part of the next two decades researching, probing, and attempting to reconcile with his belief in an all-loving God.

That struggle culiminated in Woman-Killing in Juárez, a work that opens a window on the perennial themes of evil, suffering, and the mercy of God through an integration of socioeconomic and theological reflection on God’s relation to—and solidarity with—the suffering of the innocent. As Luévano takes us on his spiritual and theoretical journey along both sides of the border, we move through a variety of Latino and feminist issues to arrive at the universality the problem of suffering, which we read in the faces of ordinary people trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy.

“This elegant meditation on the deaths of so many murdered women in Ciudad Juárez is not written in search of the culprits,” writes essayist Richard Rodriguez. “The object of Rafael Luévano’s search, through the desert dumping ground, is God. And the question over all these pages is finally this: Can God redeem the lives of the living—we who survive in an evil world?”

Ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1981, Luévano served as rector/president of St. John’s Seminary College in Los Angeles, as well as ecumenical and interreligious affairs officer for the Diocese of Orange. Currently Luévano is Catholic chaplain and associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Chapman University. His other publications include the book Endless Transforming Love, as well as a host of scholarly articles and book chapters in both Spanish and English.