TBA

Poverty. Addiction. Homelessness. Human trafficking. These problems-often approached as issues of "social justice"-are serious and complex. Passion alone won't solve them. Sometimes our solutions do more harm than good. Christians are called to seek justice and serve others, but to do so with wisdom and understanding, doing no harm to our neighbor.

How should we think about the concept of "social justice" and advance the common good? What might we be missing in the urgency to dedicate our lives-or even a few hours or dollars-to a good cause? How can we act effectively on our good intentions to promote human dignity and serve those in need?

This lecture unpacks a relational framework for understanding and engaging poverty, social breakdown, and injustice.

There are massive consequences for Congress, in its costs and the demands that shape them, in its revenues and the nations capacity to pay them. As in sports so too in the much more important task of statecraft: get the basics right and the rest is easy; get the basics near perfect and real strength is the natural outcome.

Historic orthodox Christian teaching that sexual relations should be confined to a marriage relationship between one man and one woman is good news for everyone. Rev. Kuehne addresses how this thesis became accepted wisdom in the West for centuries, why it is being discarded, and why recovery would be good news for everyone. In short, Kuehne argues that there is a way we can all (regardless of religious disposition and political ideology) apply this to public policy.

Peter Harris graduated from Cambridge University in English Literature and Religious Studies. Following three years' teaching literature at Christ's Hospital, further theological training and then work as an Anglican minister near Liverpool, UK, he and his wife Miranda founded the first A Rocha environmental field station in Portugal in 1983. After twelve years they moved to France to begin a further project and to oversee the growing number of A Rocha initiatives world-wide. He has served as Adjunct Faculty at Regent College, Vancouver and Au Sable Institute, Michigan, and is the author of Under the Bright Wings and Kingfisher's Fire as well as contributor to over ten other titles that explore the relationship between Christian mission and environmental concern.

Eugene Peterson has written "Peter Harris is a persistent and most convincing witness that the Christ who saves and the Christ who creates are one and the same Christ, that the care and celebration of creation is essential to a full evangelical witness of the Gospel of salvation."

E. O. Wilson has called A Rocha "a unique and inspiring epic," while Bill McKibben has written "No one has done more than Peter Harris to help Christians understand that the Word lives outdoors as well as in, and no one has written more tenderly or insightfully about the process of building community."

This discussion seeks to underline how the foundational basis of the human rights regime is the individual human being, and the mortar that holds the building blocks together is that every individual human being has inherent value. In fact, a human being is so valuable that we can declare what is already factual-human beings have human rights. By virtue of nothing more than being human, there are certain fundamental rights without which a human being ceases to be human. The mortar of human value is therefore imbued with the element of all that is "sacred," compelling, and non-derogable.

When either the foundation of human rights law, the individual human being, or the mortar, human value, is damaged, eroded, and cracked, the building blocks are at risk. Attempting to give rights to ideologies, groups, religions, et al, and to restrict rights on the same bases places a slide rule in the hands of governments and political organs for them to determine which humans are valuable and which are not, how valuable and/or expendable they are, and what human rights will or will not be given. It is a return to the Draconian days of unbridled abuse of power and Machiavellian manipulations. It is a return to the pre-Universal Declaration world of Nazi eugenics, "final solutions," and Arian-group rights. We must read human rights as the realization of every individual human being's interest-not the realization of the majority, governmental, political party, or other group interest at every individual's expense. There is no place for a slide rule of human value in human rights law, or each of us is a potential victim.

The universality of human rights has been de jure affirmed for decades by every government in the world, through the vehicles of all international law sources. Although there are putatively "competing" legal theories underpinning human rights, based on variant epistemological and ontological psyches, across the cultural variants and philosophical approaches, agreement was reached on the international stage long ago, in multiple conventions, and concerning broad swathes of rights.

The application and enforcement of such rights de facto, however, continues to wane in multitudinous corners around the globe. Although no legal system or law can be invalidated by non-compliance, the current level of violations of even the most fundamental and basic human rights-life, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, freedom of association, expression, and assembly-seems exponential. There are monstrous efforts in play from individual governments, regional groups and the very body charged with safeguarding human rights, the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, which equate to a full frontal assault on human rights. Such machinations undermine the foundations and loosen the mortar of the entire human rights regime, sending the building blocks flying right down to the sole plate. What has gone wrong, and how can we redress it?

The seventeenth century was an age of religious repression, militancy, and tyranny. During a fresh outbreak of persecution, English philosopher John Locke took on the sectarian zealots of his day with an appeal for religious freedom that shook the conscience of Christian Europe. Now, more than ever, we need to recover Locke's insights into the nature of religious belief and the meaning of justice in a pluralistic society.

As people throughout the world have sought to understand the causes of the recent global economic crisis, many different factors have been named, including irresponsible lending practices by mortgage bankers and the arcane nature of such financial instruments as credit default swaps and greed-as lying as the root of the crisis. Last year Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, basically agreed with a television interviewer's proposal that greed is at the root of the problem, and this actually echoed something Greenspan had said seven years earlier in a widely noted address before a committee of the United States Senate. In light of these diagnoses of a crisis that has caused tremendous suffering to people throughout the world, it is worth seeing that the Christian tradition has taught about the vice of greed or avarice and how adherence to such teaching could help bring about the transformation of our global economy that is so urgently needed today.

The amount that has been written or preached on this topic could easily fill many books. In Father Wiseman's talk, he will briefly highlight the teaching of three preeminent authors from the Christian tradition: fromthe patristic era, St. Basil the Great; from the medieval period, St. Catherine of Siena; and from recent times, Thomas Merton. Wiseman will then conclude with some reflections on his own thoughts about what would be needed to make such teaching more effective today.

Richard Weaver, who wrote the landmark book Ideas Have Consequences, called modern media "the great stereopticon." He said that modern media shape our thought process in negative ways, irrespective of the content. Marshall McLuhan took the idea a step further when he wrote that "the medium is the message." And Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death, said that modern media are turning us into a nation that no longer knows how to grapple with important issues. In this presentation, Warren Cole Smith will explore these ideas from a distinctly Christian perspective and discuss media can be used to communicate Christian ideas most effectively. He will focus particularly on the role of journalism, which some have called the "first rough draft of history" but which Smith says is more properly the "database of democracy."