Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America
Rev. Dr. Anthony Roeber
February 27, 2025
So much of American law and policy is predicated on the concept of “rights,” derived primarily from western thought. Does our Orthodox tradition have anything to contribute to the American conversation on this topic? Fr. Anthony’s presentation provides an overview of his book, Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America. His book engages the difficult question of how Eastern Orthodox people have selectively used some modern notions of rights but rejected other aspects of modern secular liberal thought. At the same time, it alerts the Orthodox to their inherited notions of “rights,” sometimes referred to as “prerogatives,” “honors,” “privileges,” and so on that remain contested both among hierarchs and in controversies between clergy and laity that have at times resulted in lawsuits in secular courts. Fr. Anthony attempts to provide a way to distinguish various kinds of rights claims before engaging the Orthodox chronological engagement with internal and external rights claims in North America.
Speaker: The Rev. Dr. A. G. Roeber, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Studies, Penn State University, is currently Professor of Church History, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. He is a past president of the Orthodox Theological Society in America and most recently Co-author of Changing Churches (2012); co-editor, Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology (2016) author, Mixed Marriages: An Orthodox History (2018); editor, Human v. Religious Rights? (2020), and author, Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution (2024).