This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparative religious ethics by "translating" the Latin American Indigenous meanings of buen vivir (living well), a subsistent mode of interdependent flourishing resistant to Western models of extractive development amid the Anthropocene. It problematizes the methodological challenge of translating Indigenous cultures from within a Western colonial political economy that has historically relegated Indigenous Americans to the primitive level of savage inferiority according to a stadial theory of socioeconomic development. However, constructive methodological options for translating Indigenous cultures emerge from the Journal of Religious Ethics's existing conversations about comparative religious ethics. On the one hand, recent critical anthropology and ethnography, abetted by intellectual history, provide tools for ethicists in the recovery of Indigenous critiques and meanings against longstanding Western cultural patterns. On the other hand, nativizing the concept of the religious classic thematizes the normative dimensions of Indigenous cultures, demonstrating how the translation of buen vivir points to intercultural dialogue rather than cooptation and manipulation.

The salience of rights talk in Western cultures has generated constructive responses from various religious traditions. This article contributes to this religious hermeneutic by turning to the rst-generation Spanish theologians of the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, as important resources for Christian rights talk. These late scholastic thinkers made the image of God doctrine, as transmitted by Thomas Aquinas, the basis for afrming the worth and human natural rights of Amerindian peoples. To highlight the contemporary relevance of the school, the article engages Nicholas Wolterstorff's recent work on rights and his twofold critique of a capacities approach to human dignity and a virtues approach to justice. The School of Salamanca not only addresses the important concerns raised by Wolterstorff but uniquely offers a view of rights inextricably linked to human capacities and Christian virtue that highlights both the patient and agential dimensions of justice. They provide a critical theological challenge to the dominant secular liberal view of rights in a way that Wolterstorff's account does not.

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