Resplendent Poverty: Mysticism, Mission, and Slavery in the Capuchin-Franciscan Atlantic

Abstract

“Resplendent Poverty: Mysticism, Mission, and Slavery in the Capuchin-Franciscan Atlantic” argues that Franciscan spiritual and mystical texts offer and transmit a theological anthropology that provides and interpretive key to understand the surprising ways in which Capuchin-Franciscan missionaries intervened as historical actors. It uses this interpretive key to examine a case where two missionary friars called for an end to slavery and for enslaved people to receive reparations in late seventeenth century Cuba. The dissertation makes extensive use of psychoanalysis as a domain of theory that can help scholars better appreciate religious experience.