Religious Rights, Civil Rights, Human Rights in the German and American Contexts, 1948 - Present

The topic of universal human rights has blossomed into a vast and at times confusing rhetoric during the last quarter century. Centers and institutes in law schools, schools of international relations, and various academic disciplines can be found across the globe. But increasingly voices have been raised insisting that for the term to have any meaning, it must be rooted in specific historic and cultural contexts. One of the pioneers in writing on human rights has concluded that "prior to the second half of the seventeenth century, the idea that all human beings, simply because they are human, have rights that they may exercise against the state and society received no substantial political endorsement anywhere in the world." But that same author, aware of the importance of cultural specificity, asserts that "human rights are not in any important way culturally relative" (Donnelly 75, 106).

Emerging conflicts between religious and civil rights increasingly defined as human rights as well as the protection of immigrants and religious minorities, have intensified recently in both the Federal Republic and the United States. The Max Kade German-American Research Institute at Penn State will convene a major international, interdisciplinary conference from March 23 - 25, 2017. Led by a collection of eminent scholars, the conference will present through an initial public plenary lecture as well as more focused scholarly sessions on the manner in which the German Federal Republic since its founding, and the United States after the appearance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have approached questions of human, civil, and religious rights. Bringing together an international body of scholars drawn from the disciplines of law, history, Germanic languages and literature, sociology, political science, philosophy, and religious studies, the conference examines the multiple causes of why the two contemporary nation-states and societies approach the bundle of issues that can be placed under the umbrella of "rights talk" from perspectives that are sometimes shared, but in others, profoundly different. We do not wish to focus either on the aftermath of the Holocaust per se, nor on the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s in the U.S., but rather hope that the concern for human rights that emanated from both will encourage engagement from contributors with more recent events.