ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2002, Rosemary Radford Ruether and I taught a class on the sixteenth-century Spanish “Defender of the Indians,” the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566). I was Professor Ruether’s student at the Graduate eological Union, in Berkeley, California, where I was completing doctoral studies in Latin American religion. e purpose of the class was ambitious: conducted entirely in Spanish, we guided graduate students and seminarians through a close reading of Las Casas’s harrowing account of Spanish brutality in the conquest of Latin America, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias or A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542).1 For more than two decades, at the various academic institutions where she has taught in Chicago, Berkeley and southern California, Ruether has organized weekly seminars in theological Spanish, providing a unique context for students to engage both foundational and more recent theological works from Latin America in the original language. ese seminars reect Ruether’s career-long engagement with the historical and social realities of Latin American society and with the various strands of Latin American liberationist thought. In fact, Ruether was one of the earliest US scholars to engage with the topic of Latin American liberation theology.2 e Las Casas course drew a diverse group, including several seminarians from the Dominican School of eology, who might not otherwise have found themselves studying with the famous feminist Catholic critic of the Church. Together, we spent those many weeks confronting the human cost of the conquest of the Americas, grappling with Las Casas’s almost unbearably graphic descriptions of indigenous suering and death.
