Erasmus, Thomas Moore, and other Christians were, at the time of Las Casas’s most active period, elaborating a new humanism. But it was Las Casas, and only Las Casas, who hitched the Catholic Church’s prophetic, communitarian tradition that promised deliverance to political action. And such action: he witnessed, he wrote, he preached, he lobbied, he theorized, he consoled, he condemned, and he conspired. Las Casas stood against the unfathomable brutalities of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, advancing a moralism that, no matter how much he appealed to the laws of medieval Catholicism, pointed toward a modern ethics of equality. In this, he was a kind of Adam.

— America, América by Greg Grandin