This reviewer still can't shake one harrowing metaphor Linda Hogan uses in this gripping work—people frantically attempting to construct a life raft on roiling seas. She deploys the image to convey urgency about our need to save human rights from meaninglessness and illegitimacy. Hogan's outstanding scholarship, presented in this volume with compelling clarity, gives me radical hope in her rescue proposal.
The author frames her argument in a brief but incisive historical narrative of human rights over seven decades. She traces rights’ ascent from the 1948 United Nations declaration to a pinnacle of “one of the civilizing projects of modernity.” Remarkably the journey to lingua franca of international law, social justice, and peace building has been a tale of constant debate and controversy. Even so, Hogan characterizes humanity's track record of securing human rights as a “relative success.”
However, with an eyes-wide-open strategy for interrogating contemporary human rights discourse, Hogan agrees with a concerned philosopher that “the political and philosophical mood of our age presents challenges that may destroy the language of human rights for generations.” Hogan's exemplary interdisciplinary and multicultural investigation, relying especially on feminist and postcolonial theorists, makes clear that this threat is not merely academic, but a real and present danger not only to the oppressed and marginalized, but also to civilization.
From exceptionally deep and broad listening, Hogan conceptualizes a new, unusually creative threefold way of rearticulating human rights: as ethical assertions about values for human flourishing, as an emerging consensus generated by situated communities open to social criticism, and as an emancipatory politics of persuasion. Then, she invites fearless, ongoing global interreligious and intercultural dialogues on “three pillars” of traditional rights thinking—nature of the human person, structure of moral truth, and role of communities in shaping both. This dialogue constitutes the author's life raft.
Hogan's masterfully written argument speaks clearly to this Christian ethicist. Her “ethical project” of deep learning and potential mutual transformation that can result from interreligious and intercultural dialogue both affirms and challenges the Catholic moral tradition in which I am situated. She commends all Christians for important roles in crafting the UN's rights declaration. Amid the cultural erosion of modern Catholic social teaching's natural law and deontological moorings, she obliquely also acknowledges the rights-centered “social engagement” of countless postconciliar Catholic communities, new ecclesial movements, and institutions that have recast Catholicism, once nineteenth-century reactionary rights-denier, as late twentieth-century global proponent of human dignity.
Hogan's warning to all situated communities not to “reify” or “essentialize” our traditions calls Catholics to practice the humility and self-emptying of the Mystery that grounds us. Catholic social teaching and her project encourage us to build just peace by integrating human rights, Earth healing, and sustainable and equitable development into interfaith, intercultural, and ecumenical truth-sharing dialogues. Doing this may, indeed, feel at times like constructing a raft with strangers on unpredictable seas. Yet actualizing Hogan's project may evoke awe and inspire imitation, as has Pope Francis kneeling to wash the feet of a Muslim woman, and the less-well-known postconciliar global praxis of the Focolare movement seeking just peace through ecumenical, interfaith, and intercultural dialogues toward human unity. Taking up Hogan's project, Catholics will become more Catholic.
Those who teach theology and religious studies should find Hogan's text suitable at all levels. For upper-level undergraduate theology courses in Christian ethics, Catholic social teaching, and peace studies, her sections on the history of human rights and its current vulnerabilities would be helpful in units introducing and reinforcing the basic philosophical and theological vocabulary and grammar of human rights. Her reflections on the human subject, torture, and nonviolence will serve as provocative and timely small group discussion starters.
At the graduate level, both masters and doctoral students will find Hogan to be an intellectual gateway to many veins of research around human rights. This book should also spur instruction in interreligious and intercultural dialogue practice.
Seeing human rights’ legacy as well as the tradition's erosion, Hogan encourages us all with these words: “It is both theoretically possible and politically necessary for theologians to keep faith with human rights.”
