John Tate Lanning

The Enlightenment in Relation to the Church

I SHOULD like to ask you gentlemen to allow me, in the very beginning, to set limits to my task. The most imposing of these limitations are my own. It would be unbecoming of me to make a tacit profession of authority on the Enlightenment in English America by discoursing on the subject. I have, moreover, never made a frontal assault on the broad field of theology in the Latin world, for I regard the subject as universal, well-known to historical theologists, and when known for Europe generally predictable for America. There is also a relation between the Enlightenment in Spain and the Enlightenment in America, but what happens in America cannot be absolutely foretold by what happens in Spain. I shall therefore treat Spain, when I treat it at all, as only a back-drop for the American scene.

A Reconsideration of Spanish Colonial Culture

The interpretation of Spanish colonial history has ever ranged to extremes. A political observer once remarked that on the subject of James G. Blaine men went crazy in pairs. And on the subject of Spain Spaniards have shown the same flair from Charles V to Franco. How else can we reconcile “the proud Spaniard” so fixed in popular psychology and the revealing verse of Batrina? Hearing a. man speak, it is easy to tell where he first saw the light of day. If he praises England, he will be an Englishman; If he speaks evil of Prussia, he will be a Frenchman; If he speaks evil of Spain, he is a Spaniard.