Christian Human Rights Research Articles

Beyond “Christian Human Rights”: Simone Weil on Dignity and the Impersonal

Abstract Whereas the idea of human rights is often imagined as placing limits on the political sphere from a standpoint outside it, I argue that it is better conceived as a political project that draws authority from its claim to be apolitical. Such an understanding enables us to historicize human rights and to assess it politically and morally, alongside other normative projects. Samuel Moyn has argued that the contemporary understanding of human rights as rooted in the dignity of the person emerged out of twentieth-century Catholic personalist theology. In the latter half of the essay I consider Simone Weil’s objections to the personalist conception of dignity and suggest that Weil’s idea of an impersonal, sovereign good provides an alternative conception of value.

Moyn's Christian Human Rights: A Comment

European Law JournalVolume 24, Issue 4-5 p. 349-353 REVIEW ARTICLE Moyn's Christian Human Rights: A Comment Mark Gilbert, Corresponding Author Mark Gilbert mgilbert@jhu.edu The Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Europe, Bologna, ItalySearch for more papers by this author Mark Gilbert, Corresponding Author Mark Gilbert mgilbert@jhu.edu The Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Europe, Bologna, ItalySearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 August 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12292 Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume24, Issue4-5September 2018Pages 349-353 RelatedInformation

From religious freedom to social justice: the human rights engagement of the ecumenical movement from the 1940s to the 1970s

AbstractThis article contributes to the historiography on human rights and (religious) internationalism by tracing how the ecumenical movement in the post-war decades sought to protect the religious freedom of its co-religionists in Catholic and Muslim countries, specifically Italy, Nigeria, and Indonesia. In cooperation with local actors, the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs worked to anchor international human rights in the domestic sphere through constitutional provisions. These activities constituted a significant strand of Christian human rights engagement from the 1940s to the 1960s, which intersected with the Cold War and decolonization. The article then contrasts this with the turn to a more pluralistic and communitarian conception of human rights in the 1970s, animated by liberation theologies. As the World Council of Churches embraced a ‘revolutionary’ tradition and worked to resist military dictatorships in Latin America, racism, and global inequality, it gravitated towards Marxism-inflected and anti-colonial strands of human rights discourse.

Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights.

This article provides a rejoinder to recent historical accounts which trace the origins of international human rights to the work of conservative Christians writing in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on the French Catholics usually identified as the architects of Christian human rights theory, I argue that this was neither a unified project, nor an unambiguously conservative one. Instead, I stress the political ambivalence of Christian human rights discourse-the way it defied distinctions between right and left, or liberal and conservative.

Freedom, Compulsion, and ‘Esoteric Religion’: Mullā Ṣadrā’s exegesis on the phrase lā ikrāha fī al-dīn

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 43, 2, 2018 © The Maghreb Review 2018 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources FREEDOM, COMPULSION, AND ‘ESOTERIC RELIGION’: MULLĀ ṢADRĀ’S EXEGESIS ON THE PHRASE LĀ IKRĀHA FĪ AL-DĪN SAJJAD RIZVI* One of the mainstays of modernist Muslim discourse is the accommodation of a broadly liberal notion of religious freedom, the freedom to choose one’s religion and to leave one’s religion if necessary, including, of course, Islam.1 The universal declaration of human rights and various other liberal modern documents of a rights-based approach to ethics have bundled together a number of liberties as essential social goods to which the modernist Muslim intellectual has acquiesced, sometimes understanding and engaging in the debates and embracing the notions enthusiastically, and at other times seemingly oblivious to the contexts and quasi-religious concerns that arise out of the history of Christendom and the desire to defang religious violence and prejudice inherited since the early modern period.2 The twin incoherences of liberalism pose problems for such reconciliations of the Muslim with modernity and liberalism. First, the dissonance between the metaphysics and hermeneutics of liberalism that seeks to universalize their own principles and hence leave no space for dissent and its alternative reading that proposes modus vivendi that allow pluralistic conceptions of reality and the good to flourish makes it difficult to embrace liberalism unequivocally.3 Second, liberalism may be a force for the good in which violence is overcome and dethroned for peace, but it is often equally a colonial (and neo-colonial) * University of Exeter This paper was originally presented as a lecture at the Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam in Rome on 25 February 2016. I am grateful to Fathers Valentino Cottini and Christopher Clohessy for their generous hospitality and invitation, and to the participants for their incisive and useful contributions. 1 Although it is worth pointing out that the question of apostasy is more complicated than that despite some moratoria or casuistic thinking on this associated with intellectuals affiliated or loosely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood such as Tariq Ramadan – see http://religionresearch.org/closer/2005/03/31/tariq-ramadan-an-international-call-formoratorium -on-corporal-punishment-stoning-and-the-death-penalty-in-the-islamic-world/ accessed 23 October 2017. Ramadan specifically dealt with apostasy in his interview with Der Speigel in 2005 given here http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-withtariq -ramadan-they-live-in-a-bleak-devastated-universe-a-384900-2.html accessed 23 October 2017. The approach posited here juxtaposes the letter against the ‘spirit’ of the law and is an example of the purposive nature of the law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) approach that Ramadan and others propose for the modern articulation of ethics in Islam – see Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 2 For two important intellectual histories of human rights, one focused on the Christian roots, and the other on the Enlightenment legacies, see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, and idem, The Last Utopia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008. 3 John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. FREEDOM, COMPULSION, AND ‘ESOTERIC RELIGION’ 155 enterprise that privileges a certain praxis of power and violence over others in hegemonic relationships.4 One need not be a Foucauldian or understand the cultural critique of Gramsci to see these tensions, incommensurabilities that seem to have passed the modernist’s attention. The aim of this paper is to set aside liberal and modernist discourses in favour of esotericism as method drawing upon the Safavid thinker Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1045/1636). But let us take first the critique of the former two approaches to hermeneutics. Three further problems plague our encounter with the liberal. The language of violence, religion and politics in our contemporary world is located within the bracketed set of three critical (and inter-connected) questions that affect and interrogate us. First, in our secular public spaces (leaving aside the niceties of...

Christian Human Rights in the French Revolution.

This essay explores the early Catholic response to the concept of human rights. It is widely assumed that the Catholic Church opposed human rights talk in the wake of the French Revolution, and only slowly came around to accepting it in the twentieth century. However, a more systematic analysis of Pius VI's stance toward the French Revolution reveals that he approved of human rights, but had a more Thomistic understanding of them than what was found in the French Declaration. The Vatican's embrace of human rights in the 1930s should accordingly be seen as a continuity of more long-standing practices.

Christian human rights

Christian human rights

Tradition and Beyond: Christian Human Rights in Debate

Tradition and Beyond: Christian Human Rights in Debate

Samuel Moyn—Christian Human Rights

According to Samuel Moyn’s Christian Human Rights, it is in the middle of the twentieth century that human rights become important in public politics and international law. But they enter the publi...

A Comment on Moyn’s Christian Human Rights, Chapter 4: ‘From Communist to Muslim: Religious Freedom and Christian Legacies’

A Comment on Moyn’s Christian Human Rights, Chapter 4: ‘From Communist to Muslim: Religious Freedom and Christian Legacies’

Against Conservative Internationalism

Europe’s integration and its broader postwar reconstruction, some scholars now claim, were conservative projects, geared toward bolstering traditional social, cultural, and economic hierarchies. Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution is a sweeping political and institutional history that reconstructs a transnational movement of conservative politicians and thinkers, who established the European Court of Human rights (ECHR) in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Samuel Moyn’s narrative, Christian Human Rights, the postwar popularity of human rights signals the triumph of conservatism. Udi Greenberg reviews Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti and Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn.

Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn

Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn

Christian Missionaries and Asylum Seekers: A Case Study from Norway

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Christian activists in Norway engage with asylum seekers and how these activists perceive suggested guidelines for missionary work. Using a case study approach, this article shows how missionaries act as agents of change: for example by hastening conversions or by offering diaconal services that may eventually lead to conversions. Furthermore, I will argue that even though missionaries do not specifically use the language of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they are nevertheless influenced by discussions of such rights. This case study shows how specific worldviews and images of asylum seekers shape missionaries' priorities and strategies, as well as their attitudes to mission guidelines. I argue that further studies on Christian proselytisation and human rights need to take into account religious worldviews, and use the discussion of ethics as a possible common ground for debates on missionary work within a human rights framework.

Christian human rights

Christian human rights

Islamic and Christian Understanding of Fundamental Rights as Constitutive Values

Purpose - The paper attempts at introducing the main differences in Islamic and Christian human rights thought.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses the Old and New Testament, the Qur’an and the European Convention on Human Rights as ideological-theoretical framework with the aim to compare religions and values with the aim to define the compared religions. Definition of religions helps to better understand the tensions of a political character, an example brought by Jacob Neusner is the relationship between the State of Israel and its Muslim neighbors, served as a religious conflict (Neusner 1999: xi).Findings - Although already the ten commandments in the Christian tradition and Islamic tradition to a great extent overlap, formulation of rights and interpretation of rights to a great extent differ in these traditions. The differences result even in the assertions that distinguish, the Islamic marketing approach from (not to say oppose to) the marketing approach in the Western countries by Islamic scholars who view the Western marketing approach as secular marketing approachResearch limitations/implications – Although understanding that there exist different understandings of what Islam is – for example, people talk about radical Islam and moderate Islam, the research compares the basic concepts of Christianity and Islam.Practical implications - Marketing is strongly connected with culture and traditions, and understanding of those by people. The paper brings in also the external aspects of Islamic marketing.Originality/value – In addition to just comparing and understanding religions, the paper tries to distinguish religions from political ideologies.

Religion, World Order, and Peace: Buddhist Responses

Religion, World Order, and Peace: Buddhist Responses Donald K. Swearer The following essay presents four outstanding examples of Buddhist leaders who have dedicated their lives to addressing the issues highlighted in “Religion, World Order, and Peace,” the document prepared for the U.N. Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders. The authors of the document rightly point out that from a historical perspective the world’s religions have served to constitute a sense of social solidarity but they also have contributed to enmity and violent conflict. Doctrinally, the world religions uphold ideals of peace and non‐violence, but historically they have been instrumental causes of intolerance and discrimination. In the face of the complicated connection between religion and conflict, the authors call on religious and spiritual leaders to commit to mitigating violence and transforming it into constructive behavior in ways that involve rethinking the formation of the religious life, reexamining sacred symbols, and reallocating resources. While not ignoring contemporary instances of Buddhist intolerance and even violence, are there exemplary Buddhists who are responding in positive and creative ways to the challenge posed by the U.N. document? To answer this question, I shall look at four different examples: Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk credited with coining the phrase, “socially engaged Buddhism;” Sulak Sivaraksa, the Thai social activist and co‐founder of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists; A.T. Ariyaratne, the founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement, the largest Buddhist NGO in Sri Lanka; and Dharma Master Cheng Yen, the Taiwanese nun who established the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, the largest charity organization in Taiwan with centers in thirty countries. Although Thich Nhat Hanh’s current fame in the Americas and Europe is as a Zen meditation teacher who leads spiritual retreats, his vocation as monk and peace activist began in Vietnam during the waning days of French colonialism, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Receiving full monastic ordination in 1949, he founded the An Quang Institute of Buddhist Studies in Saigon in 1950, and Van Hanh Buddhist University and the School of Youth for Social Service in the mid‐1960s. The latter became one of the primary centers of socially engaged Buddhist activism dedicated to healing the violence of the Vietnam War on the streets of Saigon. In 1966, Nhat Hahn presented a five‐point peace proposal to Washington that included a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal, and in 1969 he headed the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation during the Paris Peace talks. After the end of the Vietnam War, he helped organize rescue missions for Vietnamese refugees trying to escape from political oppression. In 1965, Nhat Hanh founded the Order of Interbeing (Tiep Hien) headquartered at the Plum Village Monastery in the south of France with other centers in Europe and North America based on the fundamental principle that peace in the creation of human communities requires not merely political, economic, and social change but inner transformation. A prolific writer and widely sought‐after speaker, Nhat Hanh continues his activities as a peace advocate including peace marches at MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, in 2005 and 2007. He teaches the essential relationship between contemplation and action; that the realization of one’s deepest, spiritual self and active involvement on behalf of the well‐being of others are interdependent; and that the cultural transformation necessary for the development of just, harmonious communities goes hand in hand with the practice of mindful awareness. After he returned to Thailand in 1961 having completed university and law degrees in Wales and England, Sulak Sivaraksa became a major force in developing intellectual concern over the social, economic, and political problems facing Thailand and creating a series of NGOs to address them. They have included the Coordinating Group for Religion and Society (CGRS), an ecumenical Buddhist and Christian human rights organization; the Thai Inter‐religious Commission for Development (TICD) that has sought to encourage Buddhist student associations to participate in social service and social change programs, to act as a bridge between rural and urban sectors of society, and to promote educational projects for children in slum areas; and the Santi (Peace), Pracha (Democratic) Institute (SPDI). The SPDI’s...

The Use of the Bible by the Christian Human Rights Organizations Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and International Justice Mission (IJM)

This paper explores the use made of the Bible by two Christian human rights organizations: Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and International Justice Mission (IJM), identifying the particular parts of Scripture appealed to, the hermeneutic adopted, and asks whether there are other resources in the Bible which they could use to inspire and inform their work. CSW with its focus on the persecuted Church most naturally draws its inspiration from the New Testament, especially the Epistles; whilst IJM whose work principally addresses other forms of injustice, makes greater appeal to the Old Testament. The biblical framework for IJM's work could be strengthened by a more sustained attention to Jesus' ministry as a model of human rights intervention and advocacy, by reflection on the significance of the Exodus as indicative of God's purposes for those who are oppressed, and by consideration of the book of James. CSW needs to integrate its commendable emphasis on Jesus' mission as exemplary for Christian human rights action with a holistic reading of the Bible and a greater exploration of the importance of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Bridging the Gap? An investigation of Beijing intellectual house church activities and their implications for China's democratization

This article investigates the link between Christian belief and the fight for political change in today's China focusing on the activities of certain Beijing house churches. It formulates the hypothesis that Chinese Christian intellectuals may be able to fulfil a special ‘bridge-function’ in Chinese society. This hypothesis is tested against evidence based on a close reading of two Beijing house church publications (Aiyan and Fangzhou) and interviews with intellectuals closely associated with these as well as ‘ordinary’ Christian intellectuals. Areas investigated include education, urban–rural co-operation, the demographic make-up of congregations, the Christian understanding of liberalism, and the activities of Chinese Christian human rights attorneys. It comes to the conclusion that while Christian intellectuals have great potential to play an important role in China's process of democratization, their most prominent members continue the splittist tradition of previous dissident groups while the more meaningful work is undertaken by unknown Christians away from the spotlight.

“That we may obtain our religious liberty…”: Aboriginal Women, Faith and Rights in Early Twentieth Century Victoria, Australia*

The paper, focused on a few years at the end of the First World War, explores the request of a group of Aborigines in the Australian state of Victoria for freedom of religion. Given that the colony and now state of Victoria had been a stronghold of liberalism, the need for Indigenous Victorians to petition for the removal of outside restrictions on their religious beliefs or practices might seem surprising indeed. But with a Pentecostal revival in train on the mission stations to which many Aborigines were confined, members of the government agency, the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, preferred the decorum of mainstream Protestant church services to potentially unsettling expressions of charismatic and experiential spirituality. The circumstances surrounding the revivalists’ resistance to the restriction of Aboriginal Christians’ choice of religious expression offer insight into the intersections of faith and gender within the historically created relations of power in this colonial site. Though the revival was extinguished, it stood as a notable instance of Indigenous Victorian women deploying the language of Christian human rights to assert the claims to just treatment and social justice that would characterize later successful Indigenous activism.

HOW TO READ “AN EVANGELICAL DECLARATION AGAINST TORTURE”

The statement, “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture” attracted opposition from some evangelicals and was immediately seen by the media as an example of “evangelical culture wars.” Ideally, it should instead be read as: an expression of a sanctity-of-life ethic; a concretizing of a Christian human rights ethic dealing with an area of moral vulnerability in the U.S.; a thrust in the intra-Christian argument about the concept of human rights; an argument in favor of both international and domestic laws that ban torture; praise of the Pentagon's recent interrogation policies; a broadening of concern from torture to overall detainee policies and to the rule of law; and an expression of Christian discipleship.