Dr. Lantigua Publishes Article
Dr. David Lantigua recently published an article titled "The Freedom of the Gospel: Aquinas, Subversive Natural Law, and the Spanish Wars of Religion" in Modern Theology 31.2 (April 2015): 312-337. His article responds to the recent challenge directed at the Thomistic tradition for ignoring the modern/colonial problem of race. The article claims that the crisis posed by the Spanish conquests in the New World should be understood as a debate about religious coercion centered on the permissibility of war and slavery as efficient strategies for converting Amerindians to the Christian faith. It argues that key Dominican theologians specifically trained in Thomistic commentary categorically rejected medieval/early modern arguments for religious wars by appealing to an apostolic method of evangelization and the scholastic tradition of natural law in a violent colonial context.