Bibliography: #6S6PY35L

key	6S6PY35L
title	Creating a Babel Fish for Rights & Religion : Defining 'Rights' through Sacred Texts
author	Yuille, Lua Kamál
item type	Journal article
publication year	2016
date	2016
publication title	Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems
abstract note	Is there a way to reconcile the seemingly competing claims of human rights and religious faith? Or must religion modify itself to comply with and support secular universal human rights regimes? Using the scripture of the Bahá'í Faith as a case study, this Article takes up these questions to define the religious conception of rights. It argues that the answers require the recognition that the rights regimes promulgated within religions operate under a distinct paradigm that does not conform to popular conceptions of rights. The problem is not that rights are inconsonant with religion, but that the language of rights, as understood in modern political, legal, and moral discourse, is inapplicable within a religious paradigm. The languages of secular and nonsecular rights are incommensurable. To support its incommensurability thesis, this Article outlines a broad framework under which human rights may be conceived in one religious paradigm, the Bahá'í Faith. The distinct definition of rights distilled makes possible the translation of "rights talk" within religion into a form commensurate with secular rights talk. This provides a foundation on which challenges to the critique of religion's role in the promotion of human rights can be grounded. The Article also offers suggestions as to the nature of the challenges that are possible once the language of the religious conception of rights is understood. This Article concludes: Religion can be as deeply committed to rights as any liberal western human rights mechanism, but the very conception of rights in religion is different. The religious conception of rights may not reconcile the entire catalog of liberal rights, unmodified, within its framework, but it offers a solution to many difficult tensions among competing rights and provides a tenable reconciliation of the claims of the individual and the community.
pages	309-361
volume	25
language	English
manual tags	RELIGION; HUMAN RIGHTS; SECULARISM; LANGUAGE; RIGHTS

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