This passage from Rowan Williams' second lecture is one of the most useful for opening up to the idea that our current notions of absolute rights in modern minds conditioned by the limits of secularism might be far from the ultimate expression of those that so many of us - my younger self certainly included - thought they were. It will certainly have an effect on my further use of the words we use to talk about them.
The anchorage of human rights in an act of the creator and in the mutuality of the Body of Christ can't mean any weakening of the reach of this universal justicia, this justice in God acting for for God's sake. So unless we allow for some sort of convergence along these lines between the theological tradition and the discourse of human rights, I think we're going to be stuck with, on the one hand, a theological account which fails to find any traction in the real world of contemporary legal and social argument, especially in the context of acute oppression and inequality and on the other hand a secular rights discourse which is forgetful of its history and so incapable of looking at itself critically. The language of rights was learned and refined over a long period. And if you take nothing else away from these lectures, that's worth bearing in mind. It took time to learn how to talk about rights.
And it will certainly take time to figure out how that talk has gone so wrong in the United States which has produced, within two decades, a George W. Bush and now a Donald Trump regime. Clearly the notions of rights that flourished in the post WWII era has been a mixed bag otherwise we would not be in the serious trouble we are in now. We figure out way past that clearly inadequate, secular, libertarian view of rights to produce better government, or we die.
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