For every phenomenon there is an indefinite, if not infinite, number of both continuities and discontinuities with what came before. To assert continuity, therefore, could not possibly exclude discontinuity altogether—or vice versa. It is only to assert what truth deserves our attention in the mix of overwhelmingly trivial relationships. The only arguments that matter, therefore, are why continuities or discontinuities are important, or interesting, or both.
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here & there
Materializing the Bible
by Wei ZhuThe Immanent Frame contributor James S. Bielo and co-curator Amanda White have recently launched a new website called Materializing the Bible.
July 28, 2015
Christian Human Rights
Where is America in human rights history?
by Gene ZubovichWhat is the place of the United States in the history of Christian human rights? This question is worth entertaining because there are many parallels between developments in postwar Europe and postwar America. During the 1940s and 1950s, when Christian Democrats took control of European governments, the American Congress adopted a religious motto (“In God We Trust”), inscribed God onto money and into the pledge of allegiance, and debated a constitutional amendment that would acknowledge Jesus Christ as the guarantor of American liberty. Sam Moyn’s great contribution to the history of human rights is his careful attention to the meaning human rights assumed in particular contexts. The “human rights” of the 1780s were not the human rights of the 1940s or 1970s. His new work focuses on the WWII era, when primarily European conservative Christians (mostly Catholics) invented the idea of human rights in opposition to fascism and communism—but also to liberalism. The anti-liberal roots of human rights “should deeply unsettle prevailing opinion about what the concept of human rights implied in its founding era,” Moyn writes. It is the corporatist and deeply conservative roots of “personalism” that inspired Catholic support for human rights. Personalism was part of a reinvented conservatism designed to Christianize politics after WWII.
July 8, 2015
Christian Human Rights
Samuel Moyn and the history of natural right
by John MilbankWithin historical approaches to questions of natural right, one can approximately distinguish three main tendencies. The first is a whiggish or progressivist tendency to see a gradual development of notions of subjective rights all the way from Ancient Rome until the present day. One main problem with this approach is that it confuses the many examples of subjective natural ius (“right”) to claim or to exercise with a grounding of these same rights in pure individual identity or self-assertion. Equally, it often ignores the correlation of subjective right with conceptions of the enforceability of such right through sovereign political exercise, by projecting backwards a very recent notion of pure “human rights” that are somehow no longer suspended within the aporetic space between the naturally given and the legally enactable.
July 6, 2015
here & there
How will the same-sex marriage ruling affect religious liberty?
by Jana GlaeseOn Friday, June 28, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry. The Court’s ruling overturns restrictions on same-sex marriages in 13 states. While many have celebrated the landmark ruling—which was announced just before last weekend’s gay pride events in cities nationwide—the decision has also sparked concerns about the […]
July 2, 2015
Christian Human Rights
Roots and routes of rights
by John Witte, Jr.Over the past four decades, a cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights discourse in the Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment. We now know a great deal more about classical Roman understandings of rights (iura), liberties (libertates), capacities (facultates), powers (potestates), and related concepts, and their elaboration by medieval and early modern canonists, civilians, and common lawyers. We can now pore over an intricate latticework of arguments about individual and group rights and liberties developed by medieval Catholic canonists and moralists, and the ample expansion of this medieval handiwork by neo-scholastic writers in early modern Spain. We also have a deeper understanding of classical republican theories of liberty developed in Greece and Rome, and of their transformative influence on early modern common lawyers, humanist jurists, and political revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. We now know, in brief, that the West knew ample “liberty before liberalism” and had many human rights laws in place before there were modern democratic revolutions fought in their name.
July 1, 2015
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