Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America

Rev. Dr. Anthony Roeber

Thursday, February 27, 2025

12:00 pm ET/9:00 am PT

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 will provide an overview of the objective and content 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. He then grounds these issues in the global context of Orthodox debates over rights and compares Orthodox North American assessments with Catholic and Protestant approaches.

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. Born in Paonia, Colorado, he began his graduate work at the University of Denver and completed his Ph.D. at Brown University. He has taught at various universities in North America and in Germany. His  Palatines, Liberty, and Property was the 1993 co-winner of the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning Prize for the best book on any aspect of American history in a two-year period. 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).

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