“To think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration” – George Orwell
The Las Casas Institute for Social Justice is a vibrant centre for research, dialogue, and policymaking on the common good of humanity and nature in the world today.
We are grounded by Catholic Social Teaching and the example of Bartolomeo Las Casas who argued for the humanity and rights of all peoples in the Americas in the sixteenth century, and is one of the early pioneers of universal human rights.
Present-day Dominicans take inspiration from the 16th-century friar Bartolomé de Las Casas who championed the rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas in part by drawing on the academic fire-power and support of fellow friars at the University of Salamanca.
We are based at Blackfriars Hall which is the Permanent Private Hall run by the Dominican Order of Preachers at the University of Oxford. In the spirit of Oxford and the Dominicans, we are committed to bring light and truth to the study of social justice in Britain and the world.
Catholic Social Teaching is the great body of doctrine agreed by the Roman Catholic church which sets out Catholic commitments on contemporary questions of social, economic, and ecological justice.
Based in faith and scripture, Catholic Social Teaching is generally understood to have started with Pope Leo XIII’s encylical Rerum Novarum in 1896, which challenged the economic injustice of the modern industrial world.
Since then, Catholic Social Teaching has continued to be developed and updated in many Papal Encyclicals and the important documents produced by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Two recent examples are Pope Francis’ Laudate Si on climate and environment in 2015, and Pope Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est in 2006 on the importance of love in human society.
The sense of justice and truth found in Catholic Social Teaching guides the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and is often the basis for their engagement with government policies, inter-faith relations, and multilateral organizations like the European Union, the African Union, and the United Nations.
The rich array of Catholic Social Teaching merits academic study in its own right and as part of wider discussions of public policy and international relations with society at large.
Prof Ian Linden, a member of the Las Casas Advisory Board and a Visiting Professor at St M...
Today the Las Casas Institute is launching six short online videos for use in parishes, Si...
For those of you who missed the fascinating discussion on Narnia and the Political Imagina...