Discovering and Rediscovering Human Rights History

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article surveys one historian’s experience in researching and teaching about the role of religion in the development of modern human rights in the era of the two world wars and the Holocaust. The first part focuses on the so-called Catholic human rights revolution. It examines transformations in Catholic political thought and social action as a process rather than a revolution—a gradual, incremental, and often contested dynamic that was neither linear nor inevitable. The second part pivots to explain how research on the contested origins of human rights in Catholic thought and social action have stimulated a broader teaching interest in the origins and contemporary meaning of human rights. The article argues that this dynamic of contestation is critical to understanding human rights history in order to lay bare why we have been arguing for decades and even centuries about the nature and application of human rights, and why those arguments matter to the political and moral force that the idea of human rights claims in our world.