Revisiting "Freedom and Man"

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October 21-22, 2024 | This conference will commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), with a special focus on the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Patrick F. Healy Conference on "Freedom and Man." Held at Georgetown University on December 2, 1964, the conference on “Freedom and Man” took place in commemoration of the one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Georgetown University. Among those participating were prominent Catholic theologians-including Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J.; Rev. Karl Rahner, S.J.; Rev. Ives Calvez, S.J.; and Hans Küng-and the Lebanese Orthodox Christian theologian Charles Malik, a member of the UDHR drafting committee. The Georgetown conference was attended by 5,000 people. The proceedings were published in Freedom and Man (1965, ed. John Courtney Murray) and had a wide impact on the discussions of religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council, including the drafting of Dignitatis Humanae.
This two-day conference will open with a contextualization of the original 1964 conference and provide the historical and theological links to the UDHR and Catholic human rights thinking. It will highlight the key themes of the 1964 conference that remain pressing today, with particular attention to the underlying theology of freedom at play in human rights discourse. Cathleen Kaveny will provide a keynote address as part of the Berkley Center Lectures, and three panels will explore the contributions of the original conference to the development of human rights, the contributions of religions to advancing human rights, and contemporary challenges to the human rights agenda.