Peter Leithart on New World Temples

Peter Leithart has a great post on how Franciscan missionaries modeled cities in the New World on the visionary patterns of Ezekiel.

Europeans saw the conquest of the Americas as a new Canaanite conquest. Once they subdued the land, what else would they do but build a temple. According to Hamblin and Seely, “Spanish missionary Toribio de Motolinia (d. 1568), for example, described the colonization and evangelization of New Spain (Mexico) as the conquest of a new Canaan, undertaken by the archetypal twelve Franciscan monk-apostles bringing the Ark of the Covenant into the new Temple they would build in the New World…

Read more here.