Place: Åland Islands, Finland?

In the last and final Summer Symposium, we turn to the writings of José de Acosta (1540-1600). Theologian Willie James Jennings writes in his The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010), that the reason for the Western Church’s difficulty in grasping its deep involvement in the formation of the modern racial condition fully is due to the distorted social imaginary that was formed when the first theologians and conquistadores passed over the Atlantic to conquer the “New World”. One of the leading theological voices in re-imagining the world after the textual authorities - both biblical, theological and philosophical - had been questioned and altered through the experiences in the “New World” was the Jesuit pater José de Acosta. Jennings describes that Acosta's Historia Natural y Morales de las Indias (1589) earned him the title “the Pliny of the New World”. Historia was one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the Americas for its time, widely translated and spread across Europe. According to Jennings, Acosta's treatment of creation and description of new ways to imagine the doctrine of creation in relation to the Christian presence in “the New World” came to alter European consciousness for centuries.

To inform critical engagement with this claim, we will invite symposium participants to a series of Zoom sessions to contextualize Acosta’s work through exploration of sixteenth century Indigenous codices that narrativized Spanish colonisation (El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and the Codex Aubin, for example).