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faculty assistant
Patrick Provost-Smith joined the HDS faculty in 2003. His primary interests are in the confluence of intellectual history, theology, and religious ethics in early modern Christianity, and in approaches to contemporary critical theory and continental philosophy. His research focuses on challenges to traditions of Christian thought and practice brought about by European expansion, the development of overseas empires, and Christian encounters with others in the Americas and in Asia. His current book project,
Holy War, Just War: Rhetoric and Moral Argument in the Conquest of the
Americas, explores how arguments over just and unjust wars were applied, reshaped, and transformed by the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, particularly as they were appropriated by advocates for a proposal for the conquest of China that emerged from Spanish missionaries in the Philippines. Future research will continue to explore the challenges faced in the sixteenth century by Christian theologians and missionaries in understanding indigenous cultures in the non-European world, concentrating on the primary treatise of the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta on the evangelization of the Indians in Peru, and on its global reception. Professor Provost-Smith offers courses in Renaissance and early modern Christian thought, Christianity in Latin America, the history and theology of Christian missions, philosophical and theoretical approaches to religious studies, and historical approaches to contemporary issues in religion and political philosophy (e.g., just war theory, political and liberation theologies, colonialism/postcolonialism, human rights).
curriculum vitae (Adobe
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courses:
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