Ignacio Ellacuría SJ (November 9, 1930 – November 16, 1989) was a Spanish-Salvadoran Jesuit, philosopher, and theologian who worked as a professor and rector at the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA), a Jesuit university in El Salvador founded in 1965.

Ellacuría was also responsible for the development of formation programs for priests in the Jesuit Central American province.

In 1958, Ellacuría studied theology with Vatican II theologian Karl Rahner in Innsbruck, Austria.

This opposition led to Ellacuría's murder by the Salvadoran army in 1989 at his residence in UCA along with five other fellow Jesuit priests and two employees.

Their murder marked a turning point in the Salvadoran civil war (see History of El Salvador).

On the one hand, it increased international pressures on the Salvadoran government to sign peace agreements with the guerrilla organisation FMLN.

This view led philosophers to believe that what they called "Being" was the cause of reality, and this in turn, explained the confusion of metaphysics with ontology.

[4][5][6] The logification of intelligence led to the perception of reality as "Being" in a zone in space and time (as in Heidegger's Dasein) of identifiable entities with an essence, outside the human brain.

Human beings certainly inherit constraints constructed in the past but they always have the possibility to transcend them because of their sentient intelligence.

Unlike other animals that can only respond mechanically to stimuli from outside, through sentient intelligence and praxis, human beings have to "realise" their existence.

Individuals in dialectic interaction with society, have to make out what sort of Ego to have, by using their sentient intelligence, and this implies transcending inherited constraints.

[4][5][6] According to Ellacuría, the existence of people that are marginalized from society implies that history and practice have not delivered a wider range of possibilities for realisation for every human being in the world.

[4][5][6] Ellacuría thought that before the evolution of humanity, the further development of historical reality took place only by physical and biological forces.

Methodologically, his view of history followed the Hegelian dialectic tradition, that culminated in Marx's historical materialism.

He stressed the importance of conscience, human praxis and its possibilities for influencing the course of history, and thereby material conditions themselves.

His thought shares with Marxism a common Hegelian view of history as progress brought about by overcoming contradictions.

[10][11][12][13] Rudolf Bultmann developed existential biblical hermeneutics, or the idea that each individual can only read and understand the bible from his or her personal existential condition, and the biblical text acquires life only if it can awaken an experience of faith in the reader.

It makes it radical, because it establishes that the alliance of God with people is much more than a simple code of laws and liturgical rituals; it is an invitation to justice and charity, not as exceptional practices, but as a stable structure.

It makes the faith universal, because the New Testament is communicated to every human being, independently of race, culture, sex, religion or social condition.

It arises from the spirit of Gaudium et spes of the Second Vatican Council and the social encyclicals of Pope John XXIII, and more specifically, the Episcopal Conferences of Medellín in 1968 and Puebla in 1978.

As an intellectual community, the university must analyse causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover remedies to problems; communicate a consciousness that inspires the freedom of self-determination; educate professionals with a conscience, who will be the immediate instruments of such a transformation; and constantly hone an educational institution that is both academically excellent and ethically oriented.

Reason must open its eyes to their suffering, while faith sees in the weak of this world what salvation must mean and the conversion to which we are called.

What it does mean, he argued, is that the university should be present intellectually where it is needed; to provide science for those without science; to provide skills for those without skills; to be a voice for those without voices; to give intellectual support, for those who do not possess the academic qualifications to make their rights legitimate.