Miguel J. Romero, Th.D.
Miguel J. Romero, Th.D.
Assistant Professor, Religious and Theological Studies
Dr. Miguel J. Romero is Assistant Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at Salve Regina University. He earned his B.A. from Colorado College, his M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary, his Th.M. from Duke University, and his Th.D. from Duke University in 2012. From 2012 to 2016, Dr. Romero was a postdoctoral research fellow and theology instructor at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Romero’s research interests include moral theology, Catholic social teaching, philosophical and theological accounts of disability and mental illness, and the theology of Thomas Aquinas.
Featured Fall 2021
Disability, Catholic Questions, and the Quandries of Biomedicine and Secular Society
Miguel J. Romero
Abstract: This essay aims to show why it is important to ask questions about the way Christians raise the question of disability. The central, animating concern has to do with metaphysically thin and philosophically problematic understandings of disability and the way that concept is inflected within contemporary Catholic moral discourse in the areas of biomedical ethics and social theorizing. The essay has three parts. First, through the lens of Gaudium et spes, the author discusses the source of our contemporary questions about disability and related themes. Second, the author surveys overlapping ways of framing the concept disability, as formulated within biomedical ethics, American jurisprudence, the social critique from disability studies, and the sociopolitical subversion of the biomedical outlook from critical disability theorists. Third, given those contemporary frames and in conversation with Fides et ratio, the author sketches some preliminary considerations relevant to a faithfully Christian and distinctively Catholic account of disability.
Citation
Romero, Miguel J. “Disability, Catholic Questions, and the Quandries of Biomedicine and Secular Society.” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 2, Summer 2020, pp. 277–310.
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McKillop Library EBSCOhost Database: Accession Number 147088220
Featured Fall 2021
Disability in Medieval Philosophy and Theology
Edited by Scott M. Williams
Chapter 5 | Remembering ‘Mindless’ Persons: Intellectual Disability, Spanish Colonialism, and the Disappearance of a Medieval Account of Persons Who Lack the Use of Reason
Miguel J. Romero
Abstract: In the 16th century, there was a subtle shift in the way the Spanish Dominican interpreters of Thomas Aquinas spoke about the anthropological and moral significance of our rational faculties. This chapter provides a summary account of how Aquinas’s way of thinking about the intellectual dignity and inalienable contemplative aptitude of persons who “lack the use of reason” came to be displaced from the main currents of Thomistic theological discourse. The origin and development of this interpretive shift is retraced through a close reading of key arguments, interpretations, appropriations, and revisions in the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas, John Mair, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolome de las Casas.
Citation
Romero, Miguel J. “Remembering ‘Mindless’ Persons: Intellectual Disability, Spanish Colonialism, and the Disappearance of a Medieval Account of Persons Who Lack the Use of Reason,” Disability in Medieval Philosophy & Theology, edited by Scott Williams. Routledge Press, 2020, pp 134-178.
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