Hello, my friend.
I'm so glad you're back.
Last time we sat together, I told you about al-Ghazali - that brilliant scholar who nearly lost his mind seeking certainty, who had to tear down everything he thought he knew just to find solid ground again. A man who learned that truth sometimes hides in the places we're most afraid to look.
Tonight's story is different. But not entirely.
Because this is also about someone who had to see past what he'd been taught. Someone who looked at the world he lived in - a world he benefited from - and realized it was built on a lie so fundamental, so monstrous, that once he saw it, he couldn't look away.
His name was Bartolomé de las Casas.
And what he saw changed everything.
Picture this.
It's late in the evening, somewhere in the 1540s, in a modest room in Valladolid, Spain. An old man sits hunched over a wooden desk, his back curved from years of this exact posture - writing, always writing.
Bartolomé de las Casas is in his seventies now. His hands ache. The candle beside him gutters and smokes, but he barely notices. Around him, stacked on every surface, are pages. Testimonies. Legal briefs. Letters to the king. Accounts of things he wishes he'd never seen.
Some of the ink is faded. Some is fresh.
He dips his quill again and keeps going.
Outside, Spain is celebrating. The empire stretches farther than anyone dreamed possible - gold flowing in from across the ocean, new lands claimed in the name of God and crown. The world has never seen anything like it.
But in this room, there's no celebration.
Just an old priest with cramped fingers, writing down the truth.
He knows what he's doing won't stop it. Not really. The ships will keep sailing. The gold will keep coming. The system he once participated in - that he benefited from for years - will grind on with or without him.
But he writes anyway.
Because some things have to be said. Some things have to be recorded. Even if - especially if - they indict the person holding the pen.
The candle flickers. His shadow dances on the wall.
He doesn't stop.
Bartolomé de las Casas was born in 1484 in Seville, Spain - right at the hinge of history. He was eight years old when Columbus returned from his first voyage. The world was cracking open. New lands, new peoples, new possibilities. And new wealth beyond imagining.
In 1502, when Bartolomé was eighteen, he sailed to Hispaniola - the island we now call Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He went as part of the colonial expedition, a young man seeking his fortune in this new world. He was educated, well-connected. He became a priest. And like other Spanish colonists, he received an encomienda - a grant of land that came with the labor of the indigenous people who lived there.
Let me be clear about what that meant. It meant he owned their work. It meant they had no choice. The system was presented as a kind of trusteeship - the Spanish would "civilize" and convert the indigenous peoples, and in exchange, those people would labor for Spanish landowners.
In practice, it was slavery with a legal document.
Bartolomé participated in this system for over a decade. He wasn't unusual. He wasn't especially cruel. He was just... part of it. The way it worked. The way things were.
Then in 1513, he joined an expedition to Cuba as chaplain. And something happened.
I watched him prepare his sermon for Pentecost that year. He was reading the book of Sirach - "Tainted are the gifts of the lawless... The Most High is not pleased with the offerings of the ungodly." The words caught in his throat.
He looked up from the page. Looked out at the conquest happening around him. The brutality. The casual cruelty. The people worked to death in mines and fields.
And he saw it. Really saw it.
He gave up his encomienda. Just walked away from it. Started preaching against the entire system - loudly, publicly, dangerously. The other colonists thought he'd lost his mind.
He sailed back to Spain to argue before the royal court. Then back to the Americas. Then back to Spain again. Over and over, for fifty years, crossing that ocean, making his case. He became Bishop of Chiapas in southern Mexico, where he tried to enforce laws protecting indigenous peoples. The colonists hated him for it. Refused to obey. Made his life miserable.
He wrote. Oh, how he wrote. Legal briefs. Theological arguments. And most famously, his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies - a detailed, horrifying catalog of what the Spanish had done in the name of God and gold.
He died in 1566 in Madrid, still writing, still arguing, still fighting a system that had barely budged.
But he never stopped.
Here's what you have to understand about the world Bartolomé lived in.
There was a question - a real, open, debated question - about whether indigenous people were fully human.
Not everyone asked it out loud. But it was there, underneath everything. In the laws, in the theology, in the casual assumptions that made the whole colonial enterprise possible.
Some Spanish colonists and even some clergy argued that indigenous peoples lacked reason. That they were like children, incapable of self-governance. That God had made them to serve. A few even questioned whether they had souls at all.
They reached back to Aristotle, to his concept of "natural slaves" - people born to be ruled by others. It was ancient philosophy dressed up as modern justification.
And if indigenous people were natural slaves, if they lacked full reason, if their souls were somehow lesser... well, then the encomienda system wasn't a sin. It was just the natural order of things.
Las Casas said no.
Not complicated theological no. Not "yes, but." Just no.
He said: They have reason. They have souls. They are made in the image of God, exactly as we are. They are our equals before heaven.
Do you see what that meant?
It meant the entire colonial enterprise - the wealth, the land grants, the forced labor, the gold flowing back to Spain - all of it was built on mortal sin.
It meant every Spanish colonist who participated was endangering their own salvation.
It meant the king himself was complicit.
This wasn't abstract philosophy. This was a bomb thrown into the heart of the empire.
In 1550, the Spanish crown actually organized a formal debate about it - the Valladolid Debate. Las Casas argued against a scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who defended the conquest using Aristotle's theory of natural slavery.
For days, they went back and forth. Scripture. Natural law. Philosophy. Evidence.
Las Casas brought his witness. The things he'd seen. The names of the dead. The specific cruelties. He argued that indigenous societies had laws, art, reason, virtue - all the marks of full humanity.
To recognize their humanity, he insisted, was not optional. It was not a matter of opinion.
It was the truth. And the Spanish refusal to see it was damning their souls.
The debate ended without a clear winner. The king's council never issued an official ruling.
But that wasn't really the point.
The point was that Las Casas had forced the question into the open. Made it impossible to ignore. Made everyone who heard him choose - however quietly, however privately - what they believed about who counted as human.
And who didn't.
Here's what Las Casas gave to the world - and I don't think he fully knew he was doing it.
He created a new kind of moral witness.
Before him, there were chronicles. There were histories. There were philosophical arguments about justice. But Las Casas did something different. He documented. He named names. He gave dates, places, numbers. He described specific atrocities in unflinching detail.
His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, published in 1552, wasn't philosophy. It was testimony.
He wrote about villages burned. Children killed in front of their parents. People worked to death in mines. He estimated numbers - millions dead in Hispaniola alone. He didn't look away from any of it.
Some people said he exaggerated. Maybe he did. The numbers are still debated.
But that's not really the point, is it?
The point is that he understood something profound: bearing witness is itself a sacred act. That documentation matters. That recording the truth - especially when that truth is terrible, especially when you're implicated in it - is a spiritual duty.
His writings spread across Europe. They fueled what became known as the "Black Legend" - the idea that Spanish colonization was uniquely brutal. Other European powers used his words as propaganda, which has its own complicated legacy.
But underneath the politics, something else was happening.
He was planting seeds. Ideas about universal human rights. The notion that all people, regardless of origin or culture, possess inherent dignity. That systems built on denying this dignity are not just wrong - they're spiritually corrosive to everyone involved.
And here's the other thing about Las Casas - he wasn't perfect. He saw clearly in one direction and remained blind in another.
Early in his advocacy, he suggested that African slaves might be brought to the Americas to spare indigenous peoples. It was a terrible idea, a catastrophic moral failure. Later in life, he recognized this, repented of it, saw his own blind spot.
But even that imperfection teaches us something.
It shows that moral awakening is a process, not an event. That even people who see truth clearly in one moment can fail to see it in another. That we're all capable of recognizing injustice we participate in - and we're all capable of missing the injustice right beside it.
Las Casas showed that transformation is possible. That someone who benefited from an evil system, who participated in it, can still turn around. Can still speak truth. Can still spend the rest of their life trying to make it right.
He
left us a model: when you see injustice, you speak. You document. You testify. You don't stop arguing, even when it seems hopeless. Even when the powers you're challenging are vast and you're just one aging priest with an aching hand.
You write it down.
You make sure someone, someday, knows what happened.
You refuse to let the truth disappear.
But why does this matter today?
Bartolomé de las Casas lived in the moment that the world was transformed.
When Spanish ships crossed the ocean, when gold from one continent filled treasuries on another, when the fate of people thousands of miles apart suddenly became tangled together - that was the beginning of the global society we live in now.
He saw the beginning of it. We live in the middle of it.
The interconnection he witnessed as something new and shocking has become just... the way things are. I am reminded of the saying "I don't know who discovered water -- but I know it was not a fish"
The water we swim in is an interconnected global society.
What he saw as radical - that actions on one continent affect souls on another, that we're responsible for suffering we don't witness directly - is now simply the way things work. We don't have to cross an ocean anymore to be connected to distant lives. The coffee on your counter, the clothes in your closet, the device in your hand - all of them carry invisible threads that stretch around the world.
The question Las Casas fought over - are they fully human, do they matter as much as we do? - we answer it every day with our choices. With what we buy, what we ignore, what we're willing to know.
And here's the thing: we already know the answer is yes.
We live in a world where human rights aren't an argument anymore - they're a framework, a foundation, even when they're violated. The idea that all people possess inherent dignity, regardless of where they were born or what they look like, is woven into how we organize ourselves. However imperfectly. However incompletely.
Las Casas would recognize the pattern, though. The way we benefit from labor we don't see. Those minerals in the sleek new device - cobalt from distant mines, rare earth elements extracted by hands we'll never shake. The chocolate, the clothes, the convenience.
We don't see them. But not seeing doesn't mean not connected.
That's what living in a global society means. The distance doesn't sever the relationship. It just makes it easier to forget.
But here's what's different now, what gives me hope: we have tools Las Casas didn't have. Information flows faster than ships. Documentation can circle the globe in seconds. Witness can be immediate, shared, amplified.
The truth can travel.
We can know, if we choose to look. We live in a world where his insistence - that all humans matter equally, that their suffering is our concern, that benefit creates responsibility - is recognized. It's embedded in our international laws, our aid organizations, our very language about human dignity.
Not yet fully realized. Not even close.
But recognized. Present. Real.
We stand in the middle of what he stood at the beginning of. The connections are already there, whether we acknowledge them or not.
The question is just what we do with that knowledge.
So let me ask you something.
Who do you fail to see as fully human?
I don't mean consciously. I don't mean the answer you'd give if someone asked you directly. I mean in the small choices, the daily patterns, the things you don't think about.
Whose labor makes your life comfortable? Whose suffering stays conveniently invisible?
Las Casas had to see past what he'd been taught, past what benefited him, past the entire structure of the world he knew. He had to recognize people as fully human even when that recognition cost him everything.
That's hard. It was hard then. It's hard now.
And here's the other question, the one that keeps me up at night: What are our blind spots?
Las Casas saw clearly that indigenous peoples deserved dignity and freedom. But he couldn't see - not at first - that African people deserved the same. It took him years to recognize his own moral failure there.
So what will people a century from now look back on and wonder how we missed? What injustice are we participating in right now that we've learned not to see?
I don't know the answer to that. Neither do you.
But Las Casas showed us something important: moral awakening is possible. Even when you're complicit. Even when you benefit. Even when turning around means admitting you were wrong for years.
You can still change course.
You can still bear witness.
You can still spend the rest of your life trying to make it right.
The question isn't whether you'll get it all correct. You won't. None of us do.
The question is whether you're willing to look. Whether you're willing to see. Whether you're willing to let the truth change you, even when it's uncomfortable.
Even when it costs you something.
Next time, I want to tell you about someone very different.
His name was Al-Biruni, and he lived during the Islamic Golden Age - a scholar who studied everything from astronomy to mathematics to the movements of the earth itself.
But what stayed with me about him wasn't just his brilliance. It was his curiosity.
He learned Sanskrit - an incredibly difficult language - just so he could read Hindu sacred texts in their original form. Not to argue against them. Not to prove them wrong. Just to understand them as they truly were, on their own terms.
Another story about seeing across difference. But this time, through scholarship and deep, patient curiosity rather than moral crisis.
I think you'll like him.
For now, though, sit with this: we live in the world Las Casas saw beginning. The connections are real. The responsibility is real.
And so is the possibility of seeing more clearly, of recognizing the humanity in people we've learned to overlook.
That possibility never closes.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.