Webinar: Advancing Religious Freedom in Different Political Regimes

Webinar Advancing Religious Freedom in Different Political Regimes held on 7 June 2021 to highlight opportunities and successful stories, as well as challenges and failures in promoting religious freedom globally. Each panelist reported on their work in respective political regimes, including Myanmar, Iraq, Turkey, and the work that the International Center for Law and Religion Studies has done with different political regimes.

Brett Scharffs concluded with these remarks: “We have to care for each other in order for us to claim that [human dignity is] universal…. There are ways of advocating that are uniquely Western, but that doesn’t undermine the universality of the values of human dignity. Everyone, everywhere, cares about their own freedoms. These are human values that really are universal even though our models of advocacy can take on cultural characteristics. And sometimes we have to be careful about that.”

Panelists: Brett G. Scharffs, Seng Mai Aung, Ján Figeľ, Mine Yildirim, Knox Thames, Elizabeth Clark.

Moderated by Dmytro Vovk.

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Dignitatis Humanae 2.0: Religious Freedom for the Good of All

In 2019, the International Theological Commission of the Catholic Church released the Declaration “Religious Freedom for the Good of All: Theological Approaches and Contemporary Challenges.” The Declaration studied the theme of religious freedom in the contemporary (more liberal, secular, pluralistic, and relativistic) world and offers an updated Catholic doctrine of this fundamental right developed in the 1965 Declaration Dignitatis Humanae.

This series offers a set of essays written from various perspectives—Catholic, Orthodox, and secular—and with different outcomes—more positive and supportive (Pin, Gas Aixendri, Künkler,and Stein), and more critical (Antonov and Patrick)—concerning both ideas and approaches articulated in the 2019 Declaration and its political implications.

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The Place of Religion in the Public Sphere: Speaking the Unspeakable

Andrea Pin is Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Padua,and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law & Religion Emory University

[S]ecular societies …, when confronted by the tragedies related to the mortal condition of human life, open public spaces for religious celebrations and the symbolic expression of truths. In the face of disasters that wound the civil community, the steadfastness of religious resistance to the nihilism of death appears to all as a fortress protecting the irreplaceable nature of humanity. Those affected in families and communities where justice seems inaccessible and human resources impotent do not lose hope. It is a hope that can only be assured by the justice and the love of the Creator. In such cases, the theme of man’s final destiny becomes also a public question.

Above is an excerpt from paragraph 47 of Religious Freedom for the Good of All – Theological Approaches and Contemporary Challenges, a document issued by the International Theological Commission of the Catholic Church in April 2019. It gets as close to prophesy as anything can.

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