the salmanticenses

I just now found out that Bartolomé de las Casas was a Salmanticensian.    Crazy.    The only thing I knew about the Salmanticenses was that they (like many of us) thought Jesus was the perfect man to the extent that he was not only the ultimate carpenter but the ultimate computer programmer, the ultimate French poet, the ultimate anything-you-can-think-of — that if you could time-travel back to him he could understand you and speak to you in modern English.    (Not many of us articulate this belief to its extreme, but countless modern Christians have something like that assumption deep down.)

But, looking further into their thoughts, the School of Salamanca spent a great deal more time thinking about capitalism:   as it emerged, they articulated something more nuanced than the Church's ban on usury.    They began pointing and clicking on capitalist practices and winding up with guidelines that recognize money as a good:   the concept of opportunity cost, the concept of interest being of value to the borrower, and so on.

They were also pioneers in thinking about the rights of people — specifically, the idea that there could be a universal right to freedom that makes colonialism (as practiced by Spain and others) wrong on its face.    There was much internal disagreement, but the result is a series of fascinating discussions that are relevant to this day, and are our civilization's first in-depth conversations about human rights, international relations, and colonialism — coming at a time and place where most scholars were apologists for power rather than critics of it, and where it was dangerous to question the legitimacy of what your crown was doing.

It's also vital to *continue* questioning and examining.    As we do, las Casas appears again and again as a counter to Columbus and company, a superb replacement statue on the plinths of our admiration, and an intelligent, grounded way forward.