Page - 43 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:1

43 | www.limina-graz.eu Europe and North America, as well as summon elements of current theol- ogy that might help us all move toward a greater shared vision. To do so, this article is divided into three parts. The first part outlines some of the features of the vision of a shared humanity that has developed since the 1948 Universal Declaration. The view of what constitutes “universal” is examined as a prelude to looking more closely at the current breakdown of this discourse. The second part examines some of the dynamics of this breakdown within the context of globalization and its vagaries over the past thirty years. Then in a third part, Christian theological responses can be proposed that will bring the resources of the Christian tradition to the larger discourse of a shared humanity. The Quest for a Universal Vision of Humanity The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights grew out of the trauma of the Second World War. It is important to remember that it was not drafted in an objective academic space, but was an attempt to not al- low the racialist and authoritarian horrors of Nazism ever to be repeated again. To make such a Declaration the potential basis for future interna- tional law, it needed a common, shared vision of the unity of humanity, against which such crimes as wholesale slaughter of peoples on the basis of “race” or other imputed qualities could be judged. The discourse of human rights, which had grown in Enlightenment Europe since the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century, was seen as providing such a platform. As students of human rights—especially from a postcolonial perspective (Cheah 2006)—have noted, the universal rights presented in the Decla- ration were political rights: freedom of conscience, of assembly, of public dissent, and so on. It was these rights that were deemed essential to pre- venting a recurrence of the catastrophe of autocratic and despotic rule that had happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In subsequent years, two additional “generations” of human rights were debated as universal rights, beyond the political ones of the “first generation”. The first of these was economic rights (right to nutrition, housing, health, employment). These robert J. schreiter | Globalization and Plural theologies The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an attempt to not allow the racialist and authoritarian horrors of Nazism ever to be repeated again.