The Orthodox Christian Studies Center welcomed 28 scholars and journalists to Fordham from March 20 to 22 for the first seminar in its five-year research initiative on Orthodox Christianity and human rights.

The meetings brought together an international group of experts in Orthodox Christianity from several disciplinary backgrounds and areas of specialization to discuss the major issues surrounding Orthodoxy’s complicated and often contentious relationship to human rights discourse.

According to center co-director George Demacopoulos, the goal of the project is to “flood the field” with publications analyzing multiple facets of Orthodoxy’s relationship to human rights: the history and theology of human rights in the Orthodox tradition, as well as current engagements with human rights among Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Over the next five years, the participating scholars will not only publish their research in academic books and journals but, in consultation with journalists, will disseminate their work through popular media to promote a more nuanced public understanding of Orthodoxy and human rights.

The three-day seminar, held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured sessions offering a broad overview of the current state of the field.

Kristina Stoeckl of the University of Innsbruck introduced participants to the Russian Orthodox Church’s recent statements on human rights, especially in debates in the United Nations over the family and “traditional values.” Stoeckl said that over the last decade, Russia has become the global leader in challenging Western understandings of universal human rights and has sought to transform human rights language to promote its “traditional values” agenda.

Michael Hanna of the Century Foundation led a discussion on Christians in the Arab world, where their status as religious minorities has led to a different relationship to human rights than in Orthodox-majority countries like Russia. For Middle Eastern Christians, negotiating questions of human rights is fundamentally an issue of survival, not one of values, he said.

The center also welcomed as a guest speaker Samuel Moyn, a leading historian of human rights at Yale University, who offered a historical overview of the origins of 20th-century human rights discourse through the work of Roman Catholic “personalist” philosophers like Jacques Maritain and their promotion of human dignity. Discussion turned to Maritain’s links to Russian Orthodox personalists who fled to Paris following the Bolshevik revolution, as well as to the role of Lebanese Orthodox thinker Charles Malik in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights.

Major support for the project is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support provided by Leadership 100.

–Nathaniel Wood

Kathryn M. Reklis, an assistant professor of theology, is poised to study the religious group, thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Theology Program to Fordham University. The grant, a companion to a larger grant that the Luce Foundation’s American Art Program awarded to the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, is geared toward exploring the experiential and communal aspects of Shakerism.

A Unique Take on the Spirit Within

“The choices that the Shakers made about the kinds of furniture they made were part of their larger theological ideas about the dwelling of the spirit inside each and every human being,” Reklis said.

“They also created radical social experiments. They were very gender egalitarian for their time, their communities were run equally by men and women, they undertook very progressive education experiments, and they created experiential communes that encouraged the spiritual awakening and insight of all their members.”

Lacy Schutz, executive director of the museum, will co-direct the project with Reklis. Together they are recruiting eight Fellows for the project. They will convene two conversations at Fordham and one at the Shaker Museum, beginning this fall and running through fall 2019.

Confirmed Fellows include:

Courtney Bender, Ph.D., professor of religion at Columbia University

Ashon Crawley, Ph.D., assistant professor of religious studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia

Lesley Dill, artist

Carter Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings, Blanton Museum

David Leslie, executive director of the Rothko Chapel

Sally Promey, professor of religion and visual culture and director of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, Yale University Divinity School

Maggie Taft, Independent Scholar/Haddon Avenue Writing Institute

When complete, the group will share their findings through a to-be-determined means, such as a symposium, an art show, or a series of academic essays.

“This project is bringing together religious studies scholars, theologians, art historians, scholars of material culture, practicing artists, and museum professionals both to understand more about the Shakers themselves, but also to think about the question, how do we make public knowledge about a group like the Shakers? We want to explore how artists, academics, and museum professionals all contribute to how we understand the relationship between religion and art,” Reklis said.

“What do you do with the legacy of a group like this? It’s not just the purview of a tiny little group of specialist scholars.”

Artists and Theologians in Conversation

In her research, Reklis has explored questions about embodiment and ecstatic Protestantism. As a co-founder of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, she brought artists and theologians into public conversation. But the Shakers are a relatively new area of that research, which she says makes the project even more exciting.

“Our goal at the Institute (for Art, Religion and Social Justice) was to bring practicing artists and religious professionals into conversation about social justice. I’ve spent a lot of time in conversations across the art and theology worlds,” she said.

“That work was so meaningful to me, and the most exciting part of this new project is the partnership with the Shaker Museum.”

Over the course of the three meetings, the Fellows will work with the Shaker Museum’s extensive collection of Shaker material culture and will think with Lacy Schutz and the museum leadership about how to incorporate the mission and spirit of the Shaker experiments into the museum’s work itself.

Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (shakerml.org) is dedicated to preserving the history of the Shakers, including their furniture and architecture as well as their values of inclusion, innovation, integrity, and conviction. It stewards the historic site in New Lebanon, New York, which is open year-round for recreation and self-guided tours, and offers tours, exhibitions, and public programs seasonally. The museum also has a campus in Old Chatham, New York, open year-round by appointment, where the administrative offices, collections, library, and archives are housed. The museum’s collection of over 56,000 Shaker items is the most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world.

“Women in STEM Leadership: Clare Boothe Luce 25th Anniversary Professors Conference,” takes places Sunday, Nov. 8 and Monday, Nov. 9 at the Lincoln Center campus.

In addition to break-out panel sessions such as “Persistence in Science & Strong Female Role Models,” “Ethics in STEM Education,” and “Putting Ladies FIRST (Fierce in Research Science and Technology): Mentoring a New Generation of Women Scientists,” the conference will feature keynote speeches by Cynthia Friend, PhD, and Shirley Malcom, PhD.

Friend, the T.W. Richards Professorship in Chemistry and professor of materials science at Harvard University, is a physical chemist whose current research is focused on developing solutions to important problems in energy usage and environmental chemistry.

Malcom, the head of education and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), works to improve the quality of science education and increase access to education and careers in STEM fields.

Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, will close out the conference with a speech on Sunday, and Maura B. Mast, PhD, Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill, will introduce Malcom on Monday.

Fordham has had a long relationship with the Luce Foundation, whose Clare Boothe Luce Program seeks to encourage women to enter, study, graduate, and teach in science, mathematics and engineering. Since the program was first started in 1989, Fordham students have received countless Clare Boothe Luce scholarships, research scholarships and fellowships.

For more information, visit the conference event page.