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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Review: The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights And The Challenge Of Religion, Bharat Ranganathan
Review: The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights And The Challenge Of Religion, Bharat Ranganathan
Religion Faculty Publications
Since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the language of human rights has become a lingua franca among many jurists, philosophers, and theologians. But over the same period of time, the universalist aspirations of human rights language have also attracted myriad critics, both religious and secular. For these critics, the language of human rights isn’t sufficiently common to identify, discuss, and adjudicate moral and political issues. In The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Challenge of Religion, the rightly influential human rights scholar Johannes Morsink develops an argument that …
Review: Tolerance Among The Virtues, Bharat Ranganathan
Review: Tolerance Among The Virtues, Bharat Ranganathan
Religion Faculty Publications
In increasingly pluralistic liberal democracies, citizens are commanded to be tolerant toward one another. Likewise, intolerance among citizens is criticized. But what exactly is tolerance? Is tolerance a personal attitude toward others whose beliefs and practices we neither wholly accept nor wholly reject? If it is a personal attitude, what does tolerance require from us, epistemologically, morally, and politically, in our interactions with one another? Or given the diverse communities in which we find ourselves, is tolerance something imposed upon us, for example, through coercive policies enforced by our shared social and political institutions? If our shared social and political …
Review: Joas, Hans. The Sacredness Of The Person: A New Genealogy Of Human Rights. Washington, Dc: Georgetown University Press, 2013. Xi+217 Pp. $29.00 (Paper), Bharat Ranganathan
Review: Joas, Hans. The Sacredness Of The Person: A New Genealogy Of Human Rights. Washington, Dc: Georgetown University Press, 2013. Xi+217 Pp. $29.00 (Paper), Bharat Ranganathan
Religion Faculty Publications
On what grounds should human rights rest? How should the universality of universal human rights be understood, especially given the putative incommensurability among rival views that obtain in the contemporary world? Do human rights emerge from a particular metaphysics, for example, the idea that human beings are created in the image of God? Or are human rights sufficiently basic that whatever grounds them, for example, respect for humans as ends-in-themselves, is in fact justifiable across any and all moral, political, and religious views? These queries continue to concern both human rights advocates and critics.
Review: Langer, Lorenz. Religious Offence And Human Rights: The Implications Of Defamation Of Religions. Cambridge Studies In International And Comparative Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lxii+419 Pp. $115.00 (Cloth), Bharat Ranganathan
Religion Faculty Publications
In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, including one in which a bomb was hidden under his turban. According to the paper’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, the cartoons were an exercise in free speech, a value prized in liberal democracies. For him, fear of retaliation from Muslims was leading to self-censorship among Danish authors and artists. Muslim groups protested the cartoons not only within Denmark but also around the world, some of which turned violent. To their minds, the prophet (and members of their faith) had been defamed. Cases like this …
Review: Political Agape Christian Love And Liberal Democracy, Bharat Ranganathan
Review: Political Agape Christian Love And Liberal Democracy, Bharat Ranganathan
Religion Faculty Publications
Timothy Jackson’s Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy is expansive. Across the book’s twelve chapters, which are themselves bookended by a substantive introduction and conclusion, he covers an impressive range of moral, political, and religious thinkers, including Ronald Dworkin, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Peter Singer, and Jeffrey Stout. He also discusses an array of disparate topics, including adoption, euthanasia, capital punishment, gay marriage, and human rights. His book is also ambitious: he examines these thinkers and topics while aiming to think together commitments to both neighbor-love and liberal democracy, simultaneously navigating between sectarianism …