In 1526, a Spanish humanist sitting in exile in Bruges wrote a book arguing that poverty was a social condition, not a moral failing --- and that society had an obligation, not merely a charitable impulse, to address it. His name was Juan Luis Vives. The Inquisition had already burned his father and tried his mother posthumously. He wrote anyway. In this episode, Harmonia traces the life of one of the Renaissance's most remarkable and least remembered figures --- a converso exile who moved through the highest intellectual circles of his age and used that position to pull on a thread that the world was not ready to follow. And she asks what it means, five hundred years later, that the things Vives could only whisper in a manuscript are now the stated values of civilization --- and why being able to see that progress is not complacency, but the only foundation on which courage and hope can stand.

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