Las Casas Studies at Providence College

In keeping with the Dominican Order’s intellectual tradition, our goal is to create a space for scholarly inquiry into Las Casas’s life, labor, and legacy in the fields of theology, philosophy, law, literature, history, and anthropology.

Our purpose is to deepen knowledge about this broadly-invoked but poorly-understood 16th-century priest, friar, and bishop. In this quest, significantly, Lascasian Studies seeks to advance critical understanding of the long-term consequences of European expansion into Africa, the Atlantic world, the Americas and Asia, which complex and conflictual realities Las Casas witnessed and critiqued.

The protracted contact, conquest, and colonization raised debates and disputes especially in the denominated School of Salamanca (Peninsular School) through the lens of Second Scholastic deliberations about Indigenous rights, just-war theory, political sovereignty, international law, human enslavement, cultural diversity, social justice, and the inculturation of Christianity.

These juridical, political, religious and socio-cultural questions of the past continue to echo in the issues of our own time, and are valuable for our world today.