Event

Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series 2014

The Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series is sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania Press, the Penn Law School, the Department of History at Penn, the Perry World House, and the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. The 2014 series runs from November 18 to 20 in the Golkin Room in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, located at 3417 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19104. All lectures in the series are free and open to the public.

Christian Human Rights

Samuel Moyn
Professor of Law and History at Harvard University

Associated with the secular left after the French Revolution and in our day, universal human rights in the 1940s were to a surprising extent associated with the Christian right. These lectures explore how and why this connection developed—and its legacies in our time.

Professor Moyn, a leading expert in twentieth-century legal and intellectual history, is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity, and a regular contributor to The Nation and other leading journals. 

LECTURE THREE: From Communist to Muslim: Religious Liberty in European Law

Thursday, November 20, 5:00PM

The Golkin Room in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania
3417 Spruce St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Of all the rights favored by Christian conservatives in the 1940s (and today before the Supreme Court and on other battlegrounds), the right of religious freedom is the most fundamental. This lecture takes up what happened to that right in European law, examining how “secularist” discrimination against European Muslims in recent years may unwittingly revive and codify an originally Christian opposition to secularism itself.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/about/mellonlectures.html