Religion and Human Rights
An Introduction
Edited by John Witte, Jr. and M. Christian Green
The relationship between religion and human rights is both complex and inextricable. While most of the world's religions have supported violence, repression, and prejudice, each has also played a crucial role in the modern struggle for universal human rights. Most importantly, religions provide
the essential sources and scales of dignity and responsibility, shame and respect, restraint and regret, restitution and reconciliation that a human rights regime needs to survive and flourish in any culture.
This volume provides authoritative examinations of the contributions to human
rights of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and indigenous religions. Each chapter grapples with the concept and origins of "human rights," and offers insight into the major human rights issues that confront religious individuals and communities. These include core
issues of freedom of religious conscience, choice, exercise, expression, association, morality, and self-determination. They also include analysis of the roles of religious ideas and institutions in the cultivation and abridgement of rights of women, children, and minorities, and rights to peace,
orderly development, and protection of nature and the environment.
With contributions by a score of leading experts, Religion and Human Rights provides authoritative and accessible assessments of the contributions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and
Indigenous religions to the development of the ideas and institutions of human rights. It also probes the major human rights issues that confront religious individuals and communities around the world today, and the main challenges that the world's religions will pose to the human rights regime in
the future.
Readership : Scholars and to students of law, church history, political and legal history, theology, ethics, political theory, and church-state relations.
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contributors
John Witte, Jr. and M. Christian Green, Emory University: Introduction
Part I: Human Rights and Religious Traditions
1. David Novak: A Jewish Theory of Human Rights
2. Nicholas P. Wolterstorff: Christianity and Human
Rights
3. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im: Islam and Human Rights: Framing and Reframing the Discourse
4. Werner Menski: Hinduism and Human Rights
5. Joseph Chan: Confucianism and Human Rights
6. Sallie B. King: Buddhism and Human Rights
7. Ronald Niezen: Indigenous Religion and Human
Rights
8. David Little: Religion, Human Rights, and Public Reason: The Role and Limits of a Secular Rationale
Part II: Religion and Modern Human Rights Issues
9. Steven D. Smith: The Phases and Functions of Freedom of Conscience
10. Paul Taylor: Religion and Freedom of
Choice
11. Carolyn Evans: Religion and Freedom of Expression
12. Nazila Ghanea: Religion, Equality, and Non-Discrimination
13. Natan Lerner: Religion and Freedom of Association
14. Johan D. van der Vyver: The Right to Self-Determination of Religious Communities
15. T. Jeremy
Gunn: Permissible Limitations on Religion
16. Michael J. Perry: From Religious Freedom to Moral Freedom
17. Madhavi Sunder: Keeping Faith: Reconciling Women's Human Rights and Religion
18. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse: Religion and Children's Rights
19. Ingvill Thorson Plesner: Religion
and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
20. Willis Jenkins: Religion and Environmental Rights
21. R. Scott Appleby: Religion, Violence, and the Right to Peace
22. W. Cole Durham, Jr.: Patterns of Religion State Relations
Index
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
John Witte, Jr., Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, is a world authority on legal history, marriage law, religious liberty, and human rights. He has published 25 books, 15 journal symposia, and 200 articles, and lectured throughout the world. His
writings have appeared in ten languages, and he has won dozens of awards for teaching and research. M. Christian Green is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. She has taught at Emory, Harvard, and DePaul. Her specialties include law and religion,
feminism and the family, human rights, comparative religious ethics, and religion and international affairs.
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights - Edited by Thomas Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow
Special Features
- The most comprehensive survey to date of religion and human rights, including both Western and Eastern traditions and the increasingly important category of indigenous religions.
- Devotes attention to emerging ''third generation'' human rights as those pertaining to environmental
sustainability, conflict transformation, and world peace.
- Addresses cutting-edge issues in group rights, self-determination of religious communities, economic, social, and cultural rights and the relationship between religion, culture, and ethnicity.
