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The Religion & Culture Web Forum

April 2006

Human Rights and Cross-Cultural Dialogue

by Joseph Prabhu, Senior Fellow, The Martin Marty Center

In this issue of the Web Forum, Joseph Prabhu considers the concept of “human rights” in a global context: what is to be made of the Western origin and formulation of those rights? The essay takes the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as its starting point, as it seeks to establish a more culturally inclusive approach to dialogue on human rights:

That there is a whole set of culturally biased assumptions in the Declaration cannot be denied. This conclusion is simply unavoidable. The very notion of HR rests on the basis of a supposedly universal human nature common to all peoples. In fact, however, the UDHR was composed by a small group of Western-oriented men and women when the great majority of Afro-Asian nations were still under colonial rule. Those nations played little part in the drafting of the Declaration. Spelling out now the cultural biases and assumptions of the UDHR, and indeed acknowledging that many of these assumptions are Western in origin and nature, does not, however, necessarily vitiate its normativity. Historical contingency and cultural diversity are brute facts, not answers to normative questions.

Read Joseph Prabhu’s full essay.

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The Martin Marty Center's Religion and Culture Web Forum is an online forum for thought-provoking discussion on the relationship of scholarship in religion to culture and public life. Each month the Marty Center, the research arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, invites a scholar of religion to comment on his or her own research in a way that "opens out" to themes, problems, and events in world cultures and contemporary life. Scholars from diverse fields of study are invited to offer responses to these commentaries on the forum's discussion board, where the public is also encouraged to post thoughts and reactions to commentaries and invited responses.

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