Posted in Research & Reflections on Dec 18th, 2011
Today we remember the message and witness of the first Dominicans of Española who spoke out against the abuses of the Taíno Indians. After arriving to the island in 1510, Antón Montesinos, Pedro de Córdoba, and Bernardo de Santo Domingo spent the better part of the next year discerning what action to take in the […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Jul 7th, 2011
The History of the Indies, written over the course of Bartolomé de las Casas’ life as a Dominican, is an incredible work with so many richly detailed narratives that span the fifteenth-century Iberian conquests and the conquest of Mexico in the 1520s. One amazing story that is worth relating comes from Book III, ch. 99, where we find Las Casas, following […]
Posted in Books & Films, Research & Reflections on Jun 28th, 2011
I am thrilled to announce that José Alejandro Cárdenas Bunsen’s much-anticipated book on Las Casas is just about here! Well, not quite in the US yet. Its release date should be very soon. Cárdenas, who now teaches at Bucknell University, completed his dissertation a few years ago under the direction of Rolena Adorno at Yale. Taking up […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on May 17th, 2011
In the post-Shoah world that we inhabit that has documented and witnessed cases of genocide targeting countless members of different ethnicities, tribes, and religions, the subject of mass violence is implacable to moral reflection. Most accounts of twentieth-century political violence explain such unspeakable crimes in terms of an absence of human empathy as the principal culprit. […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Apr 18th, 2011
Francisco de Vitoria is arguably considered a pioneer in the formation of modern international law (see, for example, Georg Cavallar’s The Rights of Strangers). His Renaissance retrieval of the concept of ius gentium served as a basis for the following claim: “Amongst all nations it is considered inhuman to treat strangers and travelers badly without some […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Apr 9th, 2011
Ever since Pope John Paul II’s 1987 social encyclical, Sollicitudo rei socialis (On Social Concern), the term “solidarity” has become a key principle of Catholic social doctrine. In paragraph 40, the pope writes: “Solidarity is undoubtedly a Christian virtue… In light of faith, solidarity seeks to go beyond itself, to take on the specifically Christian dimension of […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Mar 13th, 2011
Blaming Scotus for the origin of voluntarism, or the separation of morality from happiness, or the rejection of the moral precepts of the Decalogue (the second table) as permanent natural norms, are all reasons why moral theologians (often with Thomistic loyalties) have loved to hate him over the centuries. Some of these narratives are more interesting than others. But as Charles […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Feb 25th, 2011
Anthropologists have Tylor and Frazer. But are there armchair theologians? This term very often has a bad connotation in an academy that constantly strives to be relevant to the public. When considering the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca and theologians such as Vitoria, Cano, and Peña, armchair theology seems to be applicable. They have received criticism from […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Feb 3rd, 2011
One only needs to take a glance at Spanish political history to be aware of the famous debate over the (in)justice of conquest in the New World, which unfolded between the bishop from Chiapas, Las Casas, and his great rival, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, at Valladolid in August of 1550. Less known, however, was the intellectual dispute through […]
Posted in Research & Reflections on Jan 19th, 2011
Bienvenidos to the School of Salamanca blog– a site dedicated to the intellectual heritage of the sixteenth-century theologians and jurists concerned with the Amerindian question in the New World. Stay posted for updates over the coming months.