The Right Recognition of Rights

Abstract

AbstractIn Reimagining Human Rights: Religion and the Common Good (Georgetown University Press, 2021), the noted theologian William R. O'Neill has undertaken a task as difficult as it is important in reimagining the theory and practice of human rights and global justice in a world where both are on the wane. The ongoing changes are often too dispersed and evolve too slowly for this reimagining to be undertaken by conventional political and diplomatic means. Learning to speak a new language of human rights requires, as O'Neill insists, social action and the voice of moral protest and storytelling. Moreover, reimagining rights requires new ways of thinking as well as acting and seeks the guidance of critical interpretation and theorizing. This is a book that learns from political liberators as much as from creative thinkers, and one that hears the searing testimony of victims of torture and the hope‐giving theology of memory, neighborliness, and love.