Books by David Lantigua
Cambridge University Press, 2020
Before international relations in the West, there were Christian-infidel relations. Infidels and ... more Before international relations in the West, there were Christian-infidel relations. Infidels and Empires in a New World Order decenters the dominant story of international relations beginning with Westphalia in 1648 by looking a century earlier to the Spanish imperial debate at Valladolid addressing the conversion of native peoples of the Americas. In addition to telling this crucial yet overlooked story from the colonial margins of Western Europe, this book examines the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic to consider how the ambivalent status of the infidel other under natural law and the law of nations culminating at Valladolid shaped subsequent international relations in explicit but mostly obscure ways. From Hernán Cortés to Samuel Purchas, and Bartolomé de las Casas to New England Puritans, a host of unconventional colonial figures enter into conversation with Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius, and John Locke to reveal astonishing religious continuities and dissonances in early modern international legal thought with important implications for contemporary global society.
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents provi... more Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents provides the most wide-ranging and concise anthology of Las Casas's writings, in translation, ever made available. It contains not only excerpts from his most well-known texts, but also his largely unavailable writings on political philosophy and law, and addresses the underappreciated aspects of his thought. Fifteen of the twenty-six documents are entirely new translations of Las Casas's writings, a number of them appearing in English for the first time. This volume focuses on his historical, political, and legal writings that address the deeply conflicted and violent sixteenth-century encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas. It also presents Las Casas as a more comprehensive and systematic philosophical and legal thinker than he is typically given credit for. The introduction by Lawrence A. Clayton and David M. Lantigua places these writings into a synthetic whole, tracing his advocacy for indigenous peoples throughout his career. By considering Las Casas's ideas, actions, and even regrets in tandem, readers will understand the historical dynamics of Spanish imperialism more acutely within the social-political context of the times.
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011
Human religiousness is defined by two opposing deep structures of human experience and imaginatio... more Human religiousness is defined by two opposing deep structures of human experience and imagination that shape the way stories are told, heard and interpreted. Moreover, our understanding of good and evil is defined by the kind of story we think we are in and the role we see ourselves playing in that story. The terms ''sacred'' and ''holy,'' which have typically been used interchangeably, are proposed here as names for these opposing deep structures. The sacred defines the experience of those who share a common identity as ''human'' and see all others as profane and less (or less than) human. The sacred generates a morality expressed in narratives of mistrust and hostility toward the stranger. The experience of the holy, by contrast, generates an ethic which calls into question every sacred morality in order to transform it in the name of justice and compassion. An ethical story is one that questions sacred morality in the name of hospitality to the stranger and audacity on behalf of the stranger. The task of an ethic of the holy is not to replace the sacred morality of a society but to transform it by breaking down the divisions between the sacred and profane through narratives of hospitality to the stranger which affirm the human dignity of precisely those who do not share ''my identity'' and ''my story.''
Journal Articles by David Lantigua
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2023
This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparat... more This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparative religious ethics by "translating" the Latin American Indigenous meanings of buen vivir (living well), a subsistent mode of interdependent flourishing resistant to Western models of extractive development amid the Anthropocene. It problematizes the methodological challenge of translating Indigenous cultures from within a Western colonial political economy that has historically relegated Indigenous Americans to the primitive level of savage inferiority according to a stadial theory of socioeconomic development. However, constructive methodological options for translating Indigenous cultures emerge from the Journal of Religious Ethics's existing conversations about comparative religious ethics. On the one hand, recent critical anthropology and ethnography, abetted by intellectual history, provide tools for ethicists in the recovery of Indigenous critiques and meanings against longstanding Western cultural patterns. On the other hand, nativizing the concept of the religious classic thematizes the normative dimensions of Indigenous cultures, demonstrating how the translation of buen vivir points to intercultural dialogue rather than cooptation and manipulation.
Modern Theology, 2015
This article responds to the recent challenge directed at the Thomistic tradition for ignoring th... more This article responds to the recent challenge directed at the Thomistic tradition for ignoring the modern/colonial problem of race by claiming that the Spanish conquests in the New World precipitated a critical debate about religious coercion centered on the permissibility of using war and slavery to convert Amerindians. It argues that key Dominican theologians (Domingo de Soto and Bartolome de las Casas) trained in Thomistic commentary categorically rejected medieval/early modern justifications for religious wars by appealing to an apostolic ethic of evangelization grounded in the scholastic tradition of natural law. The result was an unprecedented defense of human equality and natural rights protecting the spiritual and political freedom of Amerindian peoples.
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 2018
The theory and practice of liberalism has historically justified the dispossession of non-Europea... more The theory and practice of liberalism has historically justified the dispossession of non-European peoples through the ideological deployment of individual rights—private property being the most prominent. Rather than discarding rights language altogether due to its colonialist background, the theological option for the poor in the postconciliar Church of Latin America establishes a criterion of authenticity that contributes to its prophetic renewal. The methodological turn toward the poor evident in the liberation theology of Ignacio Ellacuría can wrest rights from its crippling association with political, economic, and cultural forms of liberal domination as seen in the Americas. Latin American theologians provide historical and constructive resources for demythologizing the sacred right to private property in liberalism’s neocolonial present and historical past, as typified by John Locke. Specifically, the theme of integral liberation outlines the material, social, and transcendent dimensions of justice for the dispossessed as an ecclesial alternative to liberal individualism.
Journal of Moral Theology, 2013
HE HISTORY OF CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY may be understood as a developing conversation between the ... more HE HISTORY OF CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY may be understood as a developing conversation between the church and wider society that can be read in one of two ways. On the one hand, we can emphasize the distinctiveness of the church, drawing forth the moral implications of the creed to highlight differences between "church" and "world." On the other hand, we can focus on the nature of life in the church community, which will not only bring us into contact with the turbulence of its history but also its noble and beautiful struggles for love and truth. Depending on which line of emphasis one selects, the terms "church" and "world" will mean something different as will the conversation between them. In the following paper, we focus on the latter way of reading this conversation, and in doing so, we attempt to bring Catholic moral theology into dialogue with the comparative study of religion. We are concerned primarily with how religion has been understood in the pastoral life of the church. 1 We focus in particular 1 As a community of study in the North American academy (which we assume to be the primary readership of this journal), Catholic moral theologians work in an ecumenical environment in conversation with others interested in Christian ethics and the wider field of religious ethics, which is itself affected by scholarship in the critical, comparative study of religion and the comparative philosophy of religions. These will not be our focus here, although we will have a few comments on possible intersections between Catholic moral theology and these fields at the conclusion of our essay. While each of the authors of this essay has written for the wider audience of religious ethics, both share the conviction that deep comparative thinking across religious and cultural traditions is both possible and necessary for contemporary Catholic moral theology. While David M. Lantigua emphasizes primarily the accessibility of contemporary narratives of cross-culturally recognized moral exemplars, in conversation with historical-contextual approaches to understanding the meaning of basic moral concepts, David A. Clairmont emphasizes the trans-temporal and cross-cultural appeal of moral and intellectual struggle within religious traditions, revealed in historical studies of the relationship between a community's moral concepts and moral practices.
Journal of Law and Religion, 2016
The salience of rights talk in Western cultures has generated constructive responses from various... more The salience of rights talk in Western cultures has generated constructive responses from various religious traditions. This article contributes to this religious hermeneutic by turning to the first-generation Spanish theologians of the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, as important resources for Christian rights talk. These late scholastic thinkers made the image of God doctrine, as transmitted by Thomas Aquinas, the basis for afrming the worth and human natural rights of Amerindian peoples. To highlight the contemporary relevance of the school, the article engages Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on rights and his twofold critique of a capacities approach to human dignity and a virtues approach to justice. The School of Salamanca not only addresses the important concerns raised by Wolterstorff but uniquely offers a view of rights inextricably linked to human capacities and Christian virtue that highlights both the patient and agential dimensions of justice. They provide a critical theological challenge to the dominant secular liberal view of rights in a way that Wolterstorff’s account does not.
Book Chapters by David Lantigua
Christianity and International Law: An Introduction, eds. John Haskell and Pamela Slotte, 2021
The 1648 Peace of Westphalia typifies the “modern” starting point of state sovereignty and humani... more The 1648 Peace of Westphalia typifies the “modern” starting point of state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention within conventional historical treatments of International Relations (IR) theory. The treaties ending the Thirty Years’ War signaled the dawn of an international society after medieval Latin Christendom with new diplomatic arrangements that assigned legitimate autonomy to specific European states independent of Roman imperial and papal authorities. The ideological archetypes of Westphalia for IR theory during the twentieth century were contemporaries Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) the realist and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) the rationalist. Each of them powerfully envisioned a modern form of international relations: Hobbes accented sovereign political independence and international anarchy between states whereas Grotius affirmed a worldwide association of states absent a global authority yet still regulated by norms of universal law to justify war and intervention. Hobbesian sovereignty and Grotian international law produce the dynamic tension and terms of modern international relations. Yet the turn to the global history of international law has challenged the conceptual parameters of the IR Westphalian narrative focused on intra-European relations between sovereign states. In particular, attention to the constitutive role of imperial expansion and colonial settlement outside Europe offers a richer scope for analyzing the development of “modern” international relations and its legal-political concepts such as the state of nature, the law of occupation, and the law of nations.
Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion, eds. David Orique and Rady Roldan-Figueroa, 2018
This essay explores the controversial teaching of Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas ... more This essay explores the controversial teaching of Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) on human sacrifice within the limits of reason among Amerindian peoples. In order to appreciate the friar’s often-misunderstood view of human sacrifice, the essay analyzes his interpretation from a theological standpoint, rather than rationalist universalism or postmodernist perspectivism. It also places him in the political context of the Valladolid debate (1550-1551) with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda about natural law and the war against native idolatry. Las Casas’s interpretation of human sacrifice stemmed from core anthropological beliefs about human nature’s social and religious orientation, and its captivity to evil outside of grace and revelation. His arguments about the naturalness of idolatry and the influence of demonic forces led him to a decidedly theological consideration of the rational agency of native peoples despite their errors, but also the idolatrous root of Spanish colonial justifications for war.
Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered, 2020
This chapter in the co-edited Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered volume (Cambridge Univer... more This chapter in the co-edited Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered volume (Cambridge University Press) examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s-90s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.
The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas, 2021
The reception of Thomas Aquinas’ thought in early modern Renaissance Spain directly contributed t... more The reception of Thomas Aquinas’ thought in early modern Renaissance Spain directly contributed to the emergence of moral theology as a pastorally grounded practical science distinct from dogmatic theology and canon law. At the center of the moral renewal of Spanish theology was the ‘School of Salamanca’ and its unique blend of Thomism, humanism, and law. This chapter isolates Aquinas’ influence on Spanish late scholastic moral thought in the three interrelated areas of theological method, the sacrament of penance, and economic and political ethics. Strong appropriations of Aquinas’ moral teachings on human acts, law, and justice sparked innovative Spanish scholastic ideas about conscience, commerce and money, and natural rights and political order to address current social issues.
The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity, 2020
This chapter examines the scholastic idea of justice presented in the lectures, writings, and adv... more This chapter examines the scholastic idea of justice presented in the lectures, writings, and advocacy of key Spanish theologians during the early conquests of Amerindian peoples in the sixteenth century. Indebted to the medieval tradition and associated with the University of Salamanca, these Spanish theologians espoused a scholastic method of inquiry grounded in fundamental principles of justice and natural law. Their brand of early modern scholastic humanism displayed an increased sensitivity to historical consciousness and ethno-religious conflict through critical reflection on important sociopolitical questions in the Atlantic World related to the rights of non-Christians, just war, evangelization, and political authority. The chapter demonstrates how scholastic theology in the context of empire provided resources to challenge the injustice of violent colonial institutions and imperialistic humanism by affirming the rights of innocent peoples to spiritual and political freedom. It concludes with a brief overview of the Spanish-scholastic political legacy for the Latin American tradition of human rights.
Reading Scripture as a Political Act: Essays on the Theopolitical Interpretation of the Bible, eds. Matthew Tapie and Daniel McClain, 2015
The “affair of the Indies” cannot be properly understood without recognizing the common spiritual... more The “affair of the Indies” cannot be properly understood without recognizing the common spiritual aim shared by all sixteenth-century Spaniards: Christ’s commission to preach the Gospel to all nations for the salvation of souls. Employing the work of Oliver O'Donovan, this chapter considers the inherently political nature of the Church in the context of Latin Christendom to explore not only the shadow of evangelization by conquest but also the reformative legacy of peaceful missionary action for thinking theologically about war, intervention, and international law. Spanish theologians and jurists appealed to Scripture, beginning with the Great Commission, in both the justification and the critique of Spanish wars of conquest in the Americas. With attention to Scripture, the chapter focuses specifically on the moderate Dominican view of politics applied to the Indies by fray Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria in contrast to the arguments of Spanish royalist-papalists (e.g. Juan López de Palacios Rubios) and imperial humanists (e.g. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda).
Christianity and Freedom, 2016
This paper locates the Spanish Dominican Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) in the history... more This paper locates the Spanish Dominican Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) in the history of religious and political freedom in the Latin West by focusing on his contributions to the idea and practice of subjective rights for Christians and non-Christians. As a trained canon lawyer and theologian, Las Casas was shaped by medieval/early modern notions of natural freedom and natural law. In the context of the Spanish colonization of Amerindian peoples, these ideas provided a conceptual framework for developing and extending the scholastic-juristic tradition. He did this by institutionalizing a preferential option for the poor as a bishop and as a jurist advocating for a freedom from coercion in spiritual matters attentive to the religious rights of native peoples oppressed by war and the forced labor system. Before the modern nation-state or the contemporary internationalization of rights, Bishop Las Casas’s use of ecclesiastical power facilitated the enforcement of rights to protect innocent persons outside Europe, especially the poor and oppressed. His legacy remains important in the Latin American tradition of human rights.
Online Journals and Forums by David Lantigua
Georgetown Berkley Forum, 2021
“Keeping democracies alive is a challenge in the present historical moment.” These words from Pop... more “Keeping democracies alive is a challenge in the present historical moment.” These words from Pope Francis in 2014 at the European Parliament were not a warning against the rise of populism, or even Brexit, but a call for the EU to be true to its motto: united in diversity. Yet how do we breathe new life into democratic cultures and institutions when there is so much distrust, discord, and resentment in our heads and in our smartphones? Protracted divisiveness and polarization marks civil society and the U.S. Church during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are, paradoxically it seems, united against unity. Continue reading entire piece: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/a-new-social-covenant-not-a-contract-reviving-democracies-through-political-love
Church Life Journal, 2020
COVID-19 has disclosed, for better and for worse, the glaring truth that "everything is interconn... more COVID-19 has disclosed, for better and for worse, the glaring truth that "everything is interconnected". These familiar words of Laudato Si', the landmark social encyclical of Pope Francis from five years ago, reverberate today with a great sense of unease. The pandemic in the United States exposes the acute vulnerability of socially marginalized and economically excluded populations. From isolated elderly in nursing care facilities to "essential" immigrant workers lacking PPE in agro-industries, the discarded in their multifaceted poverty remain susceptible to the ravages of this infectious disease. No doubt extreme development, or what recent popes have termed "superdevelopment," comes at a steep cost to human dignity and public health. The spread of the coronavirus among already strained indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin offers a fateful look at global interconnectedness.
Pope Francis’s post-synodal love letter to the indigenous inhabitants of the region, Querida Amazonia, dreams of a social and ecological justice there responsive to both the cries of the poor and the earth. The Pope warns that in the last decades of the twentieth century “the Amazon region has been presented as an enormous empty space to be filled, a source of raw resources to be developed, a wild expanse to be domesticated.” The Church’s analysis of our current global crisis, signaled by Pope Francis, has shifted from the Industrial Revolution to the Anthropocene. St. Peter’s Chair has expanded its protection of poor laborers exploited by owners of capital to include the protection of the planet from undue expropriation by extractive industries.
Continue reading here: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-steep-cost-of-superdevelopment-to-human-dignity/
Book Reviews by David Lantigua
Studies in Christian Ethics, 2017
The Americas, 2018
collectively or independently, made certain aesthetic and material choices about how to express t... more collectively or independently, made certain aesthetic and material choices about how to express their deepest beliefs" (1).
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Books by David Lantigua
Journal Articles by David Lantigua
Book Chapters by David Lantigua
Online Journals and Forums by David Lantigua
Pope Francis’s post-synodal love letter to the indigenous inhabitants of the region, Querida Amazonia, dreams of a social and ecological justice there responsive to both the cries of the poor and the earth. The Pope warns that in the last decades of the twentieth century “the Amazon region has been presented as an enormous empty space to be filled, a source of raw resources to be developed, a wild expanse to be domesticated.” The Church’s analysis of our current global crisis, signaled by Pope Francis, has shifted from the Industrial Revolution to the Anthropocene. St. Peter’s Chair has expanded its protection of poor laborers exploited by owners of capital to include the protection of the planet from undue expropriation by extractive industries.
Continue reading here: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-steep-cost-of-superdevelopment-to-human-dignity/
Book Reviews by David Lantigua
Pope Francis’s post-synodal love letter to the indigenous inhabitants of the region, Querida Amazonia, dreams of a social and ecological justice there responsive to both the cries of the poor and the earth. The Pope warns that in the last decades of the twentieth century “the Amazon region has been presented as an enormous empty space to be filled, a source of raw resources to be developed, a wild expanse to be domesticated.” The Church’s analysis of our current global crisis, signaled by Pope Francis, has shifted from the Industrial Revolution to the Anthropocene. St. Peter’s Chair has expanded its protection of poor laborers exploited by owners of capital to include the protection of the planet from undue expropriation by extractive industries.
Continue reading here: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-steep-cost-of-superdevelopment-to-human-dignity/