RT Article
T1 The Religions of Human Rights
JF Harvard theological review
VO 116
IS 1
SP 147
OP 171
A1 Loeffler, James ca. 20./21. Jh.
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/183383934X
AB The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights doctrine emerged from interreligious contacts and conflicts between Judaism and Christianity, particularly in the context of the decolonizing Middle East. This article retraces this interreligious encounter through the writings of Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, diplomat and theologian Charles Malik, and rabbi and activist Maurice Perlzweig. Together they represent three different theopolitical responses to the problem of religious pluralism after global empire: minoritarian human rights, majoritarian human rights, and cosmopolitan human rights. Recovering these interrelated human rights conceptions exposes the frames of religious difference embedded in the modern Western human rights imagination.
K1 Christianity
K1 Judaism
K1 Middle East
K1 Cosmopolitanism
K1 Human Rights
K1 Pluralism
DO 10.1017/S0017816022000372