Dignity is a fundamental aspect of our lives, yet one we rarely pause to consider; our understandings of dignity, on individual, collective and philosophical perspectives, shape how we think, act and relate to others. This book offers an historical survey of how dignity has been understood and explores the concept in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. World-renowned contributors examine the roots of human dignity in classical Greece and Rome and the Scriptures, as well as in the work of theologians, such as St Thomas Aquinas and St John Paul II. Further chapters consider dignity within Renaissance art and sacred music. The volume shows that dignity is also a contemporary issue by analysing situations where the traditional understanding has been challenged by philosophical and policy developments. To this end, further essays look at the role of dignity in discussions about transhumanism, religious freedom, robotics and medicine. Grounded in the principal Christian traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and Protestantism, this book offers an interdisciplinary and cross-period approach to a timely topic. It validates the notion of human dignity and offers an introduction to the field, while also challenging it.

Dignity is often denounced as hopelessly amorphous or incurably theological: as feel-good philosophical window-dressing, or as the name given to whatever principles give you the answer that you think is right. This is wrong, says Charles Foster: dignity is not only an essential principle in bioethics and law; it is really the only principle. In this ambitious, paradigm-shattering but highly readable book, he argues that dignity is the only sustainable Theory of Everything in bioethics. For most problems in contemporary bioethics, existing principles such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and professional probity can do a reasonably workmanlike job if they are all allowed to contribute appropriately. But these are second order principles, each of which traces its origins back to dignity. And when one gets to the frontiers of bioethics (such as human enhancement), dignity is the only conceivable language with which to describe and analyse the strange conceptual creatures found there. Drawing on clinical, anthropological, philosophical and legal insights, Foster provides a new lexicon and grammar of that language which is essential reading for anyone wanting to travel in the outlandish territories of bioethics, and strongly recommended for anyone wanting to travel comfortably anywhere in bioethics or medical law.

“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

Religion, Identity and Human Security seeks to demonstrate that a major source of human insecurity comes from the failure of states around the world to recognize the increasing cultural diversity of their populations which has resulted from globalization. Shani begins by setting out the theoretical foundations, dealing with the transformative effects of globalization on identity, violence and security. The second part of the volume then draws on different cases of sites of human insecurity around the globe to develop these ideas, examining themes such as: securitization of religious symbols retreat from multiculturalism rise of exclusivist ethno-religious identities post- 9/11 state religion, colonization and the ‘racialization’ of migration Highlighting that religion can be a source of both human security and insecurity in a globalizing world, Shani offers a ‘critical’ human security paradigm that seeks to de-secularize the individual by recognizing the culturally contested and embedded nature of human identities. The work argues that religion serves an important role in re-embedding individuals deracinated from their communities by neo-liberal globalization and will be of interest to students of International Relations, Security Studies and Religion and Politics.

Ulrik Nissen addresses the difficulty that contemporary theology faces in trying to find a way to maintain both all the shared goods we cherish as political beings, and the call for Christians to be a particular people in the world and bear witness to Christ. Nissen stresses that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christological ethics allows for a polemical unity between the reality of the world and the reality of God, reconciled in the reality of Christ. Based on a series of case studies that provide a point of departure for a robust reshaping of Christian humanism and responsibility, Nissen reads Bonhoeffer's ethics in the light of both his Lutheran heritage and contemporary challenges, highlighting the importance of his thought for political theology. By demonstrating the significant influence of Lutheran and Chalcedonian Christology in contemporary ethics, Nissen provides a robust argument for a love of the common reality we share as human beings, and a call for Christians to bear witness to Christ in the public world.

Concilium has long been a household-name for cutting-edge critical and constructive theological thinking. Past contributors include leading Catholic scholars such as Hans Küng, Gregory Baum and Edward Schillebeeckx, and the editors of the review belong to the international "who's who" in the world of contemporary theology.

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: A (8/10), University of Ghana, Legon (Department of Political Science), language: English, abstract: This essay's aim is to reconceptualize Human Rights from an African perspective. Many have argued that traditional African societies gave no room for the expression of individual rights. What rather existed was group rights - i.e. group rights competed with and suppressed individual entitlements in the traditional African settings. Arguably, it must be said that whiles modern conception of human rights is attributable to the modern western history, no culture can claim any historical glory. The idea of equal and inalienable human rights was missing not only in non-western traditions but also in western societies. For many Africanists, traditional mores gave better expression to human rights than the current neo-colonial states. The different worldview regarding cosmology, ontology and metaphysics, gave expression to their human rights conceptions. African societies are built on the principle of communitarianism manifest in the extended family systems. Thus, the stricter sense of individualism, which is at the core of modernism is inconceivable in Africa. Individual and group rights are entwined in a typical African setting. Collective rights, arguably, complement rather than compete with individual rights. The full enjoyment of individual rights is inseparably conditioned on the rights of the group to which one belongs. I delve into this debate to examine the nexus between communism and expression of human rights in Africa.