The historic relationship between Christianity and human rights is an ambiguous one. For hundreds of years the Christian Church actively promoted religious intolerance and persecuted those who failed to accept its moral values and customs. Many of these values and practices are today rejected as contrary to a human rights culture and moral decency. Max Stackhouse argues that while “[t]he deep roots of human rights ideals are rooted nowhere else than in the biblical tradition,” these values “remained a minority tradition (within the Church) for centuries.” James Woods, in turn, argues that “religion and freedom have not been natural allies.”

The affirmation of human rights emerged painfully and belatedly in the Christian Church. The “deep biblical roots of human rights ideals” have, however, periodically been acknowledged and retrieved throughout the history of the church in an attempt to correct wrongs, repudiate theological support for abuses, and to pursue a more humane society. The history of the emergence of human rights within the Western Christian tradition, recognises that religions develop in interaction with other social and cultural forces in society. I argue in what follows that the relationship between Christianity and the human rights tradition can only enrich society to the extent that the relationship is sustained by mutual critique and correction.

The Holocaust remains imprinted on western consciousness as the epitome of a crime “which no human justice can eradicate.” Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, knew this well. The tragedy of the Holocaust is that the cry “never again,” which came in its wake, has failed to control human evil. Stories of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa and elsewhere remind us of the capacity of humankind to commit the kind of heinous crimes that no amount of human justice nor reparation can assuage. This tragic reality motivates Carlos Nino in Radical Evil on Trial to pose the all-important question: “How shall we live with evil? How shall we respond to massive human rights violations committed either by State actors or by others with the consent and tolerance of their governments?”

In order to understand the changes that occurred in the Buddhist Sangha (monastic community) in Sri Lanka during and after colonialization by the British, it is first necessary to understand the situation of Buddhism prior to colonialization as well as the relationship of Buddhism to secular power and the idea of civil law.

Location is crucial to understanding the position of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Buddhism definitively changed the Indian model's relationship of the Sangha to the political order. From the earliest times Sri Lankan Buddhism was connected to kingship and to the geographic space of the island of Sri Lanka, in a way that seems unique in Buddhist history. In Sri Lanka the Buddhist king was not answerable to a ‘god’, but was elected by the Sangha and other high ministers and was required to patronize the Sangha and enforce social stability.

In his critique of Clifford Geertz, Talal Asad claims that religion is not just a symbolic system but a system of power, in many cases, one that is totalizing in character. Asad's argument can be demonstrated in Sri Lanka, where the implantation of a ‘secular government’ during colonial times by the British profoundly altered the relationship between Buddhism and the inhabitants of Sri Lanka. The modern idea of religion as divorced from power succeeded in dislodging the influence that Buddhism had over Sri Lankan politics, but only for a short time.

As a “liberal natural lawyer,” I take a good amount of ribbing from colleagues in the legal academy. I'm told my self-description is either an oxymoron or just my own “language game.” But from such a perspective, I was recently provoked to examine the post-modern enterprise by an exchange I had with an eminent Jesuit philosopher who was giving an address at a local Catholic seminary on some conflicting currents in neoscholastic philosophy.

In his formal remarks, the renowned Thomist took a rather hard swipe at post-modernism, singling out Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty for special scorn. Afterwards, in a personal chat, I asked him what he found so troubling about the outlooks of those influential, contemporary thinkers. He gave the succinct response that I should have expected from such an erudite Aristotelian. “People like Focault and Rorty,” he said “have destroyed the sense of wonder.”

Given the gentleman's stature, I took his criticism quite seriously. However I'd like to offer a broader reading of those two most notable post-moderns-commending them for the valid and important contributions they've made. But I'd also like to point out where they come up short and may even be searching themselves for something beyond the conventional understandings of their works.

Foucalt and Rorty represent two quite different strains of post-modernism. Foucault is the pre-eminent French post-structuralist while Rorty, an American, is often reviled by such radicals as a decadent moderate and an apologist for the North Atlantic bourgeoisie.

Over the past four hundred years, international law has increasingly distanced itself from the theological discourse that was once at its core. Today there is some evidence of a renewed conversation between international lawyers and those with theological expertise or concerns. But that conversation is far from advanced. With notable exceptions, theologians, within the Christian tradition at least, have implicitly heeded Albert Gentili's late 16th century warning—“Let the theologians keep silence about a matter which is outside of their province”—to the point of letting international law go its own way. At least the relationship of theology to international law is not a frequent topic at meetings of theologians, or of the books and articles which they write. As for the manner in which international law treats religion and the theological discourse that it spawns, the current vice president of the International Court of Justice remarks that, “in the twentieth century, international law has so far distanced itself from religion that the latter receives scarcely a mention in the standard treatises.” Gone are the days when those who shaped modern international law, such as Suarez and Vitoria, were also highly trained theologians. Thus from the sides of both theology and international law, there is a long way to go if we are to get back to—and move beyond—the way things once were.

In the mid-1970s, I attended one of the early conferences on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). It was held in Stanton, Virginia in the heart of Mennonite country. At that point, very few people had heard of ADR, but almost all acknowledged that the civil litigation system was broken. The bar establishment was willing to look almost anywhere for help. There were American Bar Association representatives at the conference, and their attitude was one of curiosity that disputes might be resolved outside the traditional litigation and negotiation processes. At the conference, some of the leading speakers were members of Mennonite dispute resolution groups. They seemed to many lawyers as if they had stepped off of another planet, but they told of a history of dealing with disputes through alternate means. They served as teachers to the ABA and the rest of us. Since then, of course, everything has changed. ADR has swept the country. It would probably be malpractice for a lawyer to not consider alternative means for resolving civil disputes.