Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Roth, “P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”

15890Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that all human beings are “endowed with reason and conscience,” a phrase which suggests a Western, individualist worldview. In fact, as Mary Ann Glendon recounts in A World Made New, the phrase appears in the document largely at the instigation of the Chinese delegate, P.C. Chang, who wished to temper Western individualism. The original text referred only to “reason,” which Chang sought to balance by adding the Chinese word, ren, for a Confucian concept which would be roughly translated in English as “two-man mindedness”–benevolence, or empathy. The drafters apparently found it impossible to translate ren in a felicitous way and so settled on “conscience,” which has a rather different connotation. It’s interesting to think about what human rights law would look like today if Chang’s more communitarian concept had made it into the document.

This story is no doubt discussed in a forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press, P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by scholar Hans Ingvar Roth (Stockholm University). The publisher’s description follows:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the world’s best-known and most translated documents. When it was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in December in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the writing group, called it a new “Magna Carta for all mankind.” The passage of time has shown Roosevelt to have been largely correct in her prediction as to the declaration’s importance. No other document in the world today can claim a comparable standing in the international community.

Roosevelt and French legal expert René Cassin have often been represented as the principal authors of the UN Declaration. But in fact, it resulted from a collaborative effort involving a number of individuals in different capacities. One of the declaration’s most important authors was the vice chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Peng Chun Chang (1892-1957), a Chinese diplomat and philosopher whose contribution has been the focus of growing attention in recent years. Indeed, it is Chang who deserves the credit for the universality and religious ecumenism that are now regarded as the declaration’s defining features. Despite this, Chang’s extraordinary contribution was overlooked by historians for many years.

Peng Chun Chang was a modern-day Renaissance man—teacher, scholar, university chancellor, playwright, diplomat, and politician. A true cosmopolitan, he was deeply involved in the cultural exchange between East and West, and the dramatic events of his life left a profound mark on his intellectual and political work. P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of this extraordinary actor on the world stage, who belonged to the same generation as Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on previously unknown sources, it casts new light on Chang’s multifaceted life and involvement with one of modern history’s most important documents.

Posted on by amnania

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Smith, “Modernity and Its Discontents”

From the author of what was a helpful book on the thought of Leo Strauss for Smithnovices like me, here is a very interesting new book about the modern condition and its pathologies: Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (YUP), by the political theorist Steven B. Smith. A special bonus: the book has a chapter on “The Political Teaching of Lampedusa’s The Leopard,” which includes this line: “the book is a profound meditation on the problem of modernity.” Professor Smith’s book is worth purchasing for that chapter alone.

Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics–from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin–this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

On American Universalism

At the First Things site today, I have a review of a current exhibit, “Canova’s George Washington,” at the Frick Collection in New York. I argue that Canova’s famous statue of our first President is not a celebration of Enlightenment universalism, but an admonition against the course of empire:

In fact, the Farewell Address, which Canova depicts Washington writing, famously warned Americans against involvement in world revolution. Not only should America “steer clear of permanent alliances” with foreign countries, Washington wrote, she should have “with them as little political connection as possible.” Neutrality with respect to foreign quarrels was the best policy for America.  Why risk the new nation’s peace and prosperity by entangling it in the intrigues of the old?

The context for this warning was, of course, the French Revolution, and the campaign by Jeffersonians to commit the United States to Republican France’s war against Great Britain. Jeffersonians thought the French Revolution, with its universal Declaration of the Rights of Man—all men, everywhere, not just the French—its rationalism, and its destruction of the old regime, was a natural continuation of our own, and thus worthy of American support. But Washington had proclaimed American neutrality in the conflict. The Farewell Address was a rejection of the Jeffersonian, universalist interpretation of our Revolution, and everyone would have seen it that way at the time.

To my mind, then, Canova’s statue doesn’t suggest a celebration of universalism and progress. It suggests, instead, that Americans, like the Romans before us, are apt to stray from republican virtues in a quest for empire, and warns us against such a path.

You can read the whole review at the First Things site, here.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Eller, “Inventing American Tradition”

In the spirit of the famous Eric Hobsbawm-edited volume (“The Invention of Tradition”) Traditioncomes this seemingly not-quite as acerbic, but still generally skeptical, volume by sociologist Jack David Eller: Inventing American Tradition: From the Mayflower to Cinco de Mayo (Reaktion Books). At the very least, and notwithstanding any differences in point of view, it’s an appropriate listing for the co-leaders of the Tradition Project.

What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? How did a British drinking song become the national anthem of the United States? And what makes Superman so darned American? Every tradition, even the noblest and most cherished, has a history, nowhere more so than in the usa, which was born with a relative indifference, if not hostility, to the past. Most Americans would be surprised to learn just how recent – and controversial – the origins of their traditions are, as well as how those origins are often related to the trauma of the Civil War and to fears for American identity stemming from immigration and socialism.

Inventing American Tradition explores a wide range of beloved traditions, including political symbols, holidays, lifestyles and fictional characters, and looks at the people who conceived of and adapted them into the forms familiar to Americans – and the innumerable people around the world influenced by American culture – today.

What emerges is the realization that all traditions are invented by particular people at particular times for particular reasons, and that the process of ‘traditioning’ is forever ongoing.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Zick, “The Dynamic Free Speech Clause”

Continuing with the speech theme in this week’s new book selections, here is a new Speech #2volume concerning the interaction of the Speech Clause with other constitutional rights, including the two constitutional clauses dealing with religious freedom. The historical parallels between the rights of religious freedom and freedom of speech–and in particular the claims made about their justifications and limits–are themselves an interesting subject of study. The book is The Dynamic Free Speech Clause: Free Speech and Its Relation to Other Constitutional Rights, by Timothy Zick (OUP).

The right to free speech intersects with many other constitutional rights. Those intersections have significantly influenced the recognition, scope, and meaning of rights, ranging from freedom of the press to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. They have also influenced interpretation of the Free Speech Clause itself. This book examines the relations between the U.S. Constitution’s Free Speech Clause and other constitutional rights. Free speech principles and doctrines have brought about constitutional rights including equal protection, the right to abortion, and the free exercise of religion. They have also provided mediating principles for constructive debates about constitutional rights. At the same time, in its interactions with other constitutional rights, the Free Speech Clause has also been a complicating force. It has often dominated rights discourse and has subordinated or supplanted free press, assembly, petition, and free exercise rights.

Currently, courts and commentators are fashioning the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in the image of the Free Speech Clause. Borrowing the Free Speech Clause for this purpose may turn out to be detrimental for both rights. While examining the dynamics that have brought free speech and other rights together, the book assesses the products and consequences of these intersections, and draws important lessons from them about constitutional rights and constitutional liberty. Ultimately, the book defends a pluralistic conception of constitutional rights that seeks to leverage the power of the Free Speech Clause but also tame its propensity to subordinate, supplant, and eclipse other constitutional rights.

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

“The Free Speech Century” (Stone & Bollinger eds.)

The interpretation of the freedom of speech over the last century has resulted in its Speechunparalleled expansion. At no time in American history has the right protected more, and at no time has it reflected the fundamental premises of civil libertarianism more, than today. A new volume of essays reflects on the evolution of the freedom of speech on these libertarian premises over the last hundred years: The Free Speech Century, edited by Geoffrey Stone and Lee Bollinger (OUP).

The Supreme Court’s 1919 decision in Schenck vs. the United States is one of the most important free speech cases in American history. Written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is most famous for first invoking the phrase “clear and present danger.” Although the decision upheld the conviction of an individual for criticizing the draft during World War I, it also laid the foundation for our nation’s robust protection of free speech. Over time, the standard Holmes devised made freedom of speech in America a reality rather than merely an ideal.

In The Free Speech Century, two of America’s leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars–Cass Sunstein, Lawrence Lessig, Laurence Tribe, Kathleen Sullivan, Catherine McKinnon, among others–to evaluate the evolution of free speech doctrine since Schenk and to assess where it might be headed in the future. Since 1919, First Amendment jurisprudence in America has been a signal development in the history of constitutional democracies–remarkable for its level of doctrinal refinement, remarkable for its lateness in coming (in relation to the adoption of the First Amendment), and remarkable for the scope of protection it has afforded since the 1960s. Over the course of The First Amendment Century, judicial engagement with these fundamental rights has grown exponentially. We now have an elaborate set of free speech laws and norms, but as Stone and Bollinger stress, the context is always shifting. New societal threats like terrorism, and new technologies of communication continually reshape our understanding of what speech should be allowed.

Publishing on the one hundredth anniversary of the decision that laid the foundation for America’s free speech tradition, The Free Speech Century will serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in how our understanding of the First Amendment transformed over time and why it is so critical both for the United States and for the world today.

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The Proper Response to the Crisis in the Catholic Church: Give the Laity a Role in the Appointment and Removal of Diocesan Bishops

 

consecration of st ambrose as archbishop (1)
The Consecration of Ambrose as Bishop of Milan (Juan Valdes-Leal, 1673)

 

By Robert Delahunty* & Andrew Ratelle**

The past few weeks in the life of the Catholic Church in America are proof of a twelfth century English proverb that “often the end fails to equal the beginning.”

What began some fifteen or more years ago as a series of promised reforms, compounded with yet more promises, has made a full circle return to the point of origin. A prince of the Church has been caught yet again in deeply hypocritical, sinful, and, if not for statutes of limitation, tortious and even criminal behavior. But this time, a coterie of fellow bishops and peers is gathered about him, unable or unwilling to see where the line between charitable forbearance and public condemnation must be drawn. According to the New York Times:

Between 1994 and 2008, multiple reports about the cardinal’s transgressions with adult seminary students were made to American bishops, the pope’s representative in Washington and, finally, Pope Benedict XVI. Two New Jersey dioceses secretly paid settlements, in 2005 and 2007, to two men … for allegations against the archbishop.

And now comes the news of a Pennsylvania grand jury’s findings that in six of the State’s eight dioceses, bishops and other clerical leaders concealed at least one thousand identified cases of child sexual abuse for a period of over seventy years. The grand jury wrote:

“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability.” …  “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

This is indeed “a spiritual crisis” that cuts deeper with every revelation. It is a “crisis” that goes much deeper than the episcopate seems competent or willing to handle.

The Catholic laity must assume far greater responsibility for the conduct of their bishops and priests, and the hierarchy must give them the tools to do so. Below, we outline a series of lay-led initiatives, ranging from least to most radical, for a project of reform. Most importantly, we recommend that the laity have a greater role in the appointment and removal of diocesan bishops.

The Failure of the Hierarchy

The unfolding story of Cardinal McCarrick’s decades of sexual predation is both dismal and familiar. But those disclosures are not the most dismaying part of the current crisis. What makes the McCarrick matter different is the unbelievable lameness of his fellow bishops’ excuses for their repeated failure to challenge him. Loyal Catholics have been driven to the conclusion that their Church’s hierarchy is utterly compromised. It has proven itself unfit to perform the urgent task of dealing with the rot that it has allowed to fester in its own ranks. The bishops— “good” and “bad” alike—have betrayed the faithful.

In addition to sexual abuse, there are two problems here. One problem is the continuing influence of “bad” bishops, willing to use their power to protect abusers, to promote them, and to marginalize those who would denounce them. The other problem is the silence (or at least the shrugging of the shoulders) of “good” bishops, unwilling to condemn the corrupt practices of their peers. This silence is not always intentional complicity, but it is close enough—a distinction with no real difference.

The American Church, it seems, has its own version of the Deep State, committed to obstructing genuine reform and to punishing those who question its authority.

For the Church to respond to this threat, the laity must now do what the bishops ought to have done years—decades—ago.

We are not talking only about the investigation and correction of priests and bishops who are guilty of sexual abuse. The Church has always had such priests, and canon law structures—though under-enforced—have long been in place to correct them. Clerical sexual abuse is the primary problem, but it is not the only one.

The real task ahead is instead to devise and implement processes, in which lay participation is extensive, that will police the bishops as they ought to have policed themselves. Investigation and punishment of abuses are not enough. It is essential to develop institution-wide remedies. The crisis in the Church is a structural or Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Koerpel, “Maurice Blondel”

Few thinkers have had more to say about the relationship between reason, revelation, Blondeltheology, and tradition than Maurice Blondel, the French Catholic philosopher of the war period and critic of modernity. Here is a new work on this understudied figure, Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition (Notre Dame Press), by Robert C. Koerpel.

During the past few decades there has been renewed interest in the twentieth-century French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) and his influence on modern and contemporary theology, but little scholarship has been published in the English-speaking world. In Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition, Robert Koerpel examines Blondel’s work, the historical and theological development of the idea of tradition in modern Catholicism, tradition’s relation to reason and revelation, and Blondel’s influence on Catholicism’s understanding of tradition. The book presents aspects of Blondel’s thought that deserve to be more widely known and contributes to important debates in current theology on modern French Catholic thought and the emerging conversations surrounding them. Koerpel looks to the cultural context from which Blondel’s thought emerges by situating it within the broader conceptual, historical, and theological developments of modernity. He examines the problem of reason and revelation in modern Catholicism, the role and nature of tradition, and the relationships between theology and history, truth and change, nature and grace, and scripture and the development of doctrine.

This book provides readers with an appreciation of Blondel’s conceptually creative answer to how tradition represents the Word of God in human history and why it is one of his most important contributions to modern and contemporary theology. They will discover how this contribution restores the animated vitality between the institutional and liturgical dimensions of tradition essential to the living, dynamic nature of Catholicism.