Roger Ruston
Christendom Trust Research Fellow (2000–2004) at the Centre for Law and Religion, Cardiff Law School
Sponsored by the Justice and Peace Commission of the English Dominican Province, of which he is a co-opted member, Roger obtained funding from the Trust for a research and writing project on human rights and theology. Central to his research has been a study of the origins of natural rights concepts in Christian political theology in the formative early-modern period in Spain (the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Las Casas) and England (John Locke). The object of the work has been to throw light on the development of human rights by Christian theologians before the secular Enlightenment, in the context of early European colonialism; and the subsequent ambivalent attitude of the Church towards modern human rights ideas in the face of secular liberalism. On the one hand the Church wants to support justice towards the poor of the world, on the other hand it resents the intrusion of liberal, individualism into its internal life.
The outcome of this work has been:
Human Rights and the Image of God, published by SCM-Canterbury Press, July 2004, £18.99, 312pp.; for the contents, go to Human Rights and the Image of God, synopsis of headings. And
Human Rights and the Image of God, a conference organized by the Dominican Justice and Peace Commission, held at Blackfriars, Oxford on 16 October 2004, with substantial inputs from: Ian Linden (internationalist and author of A New Map of the World, DLT, 2004); Tina Beattie (theologian, author of many books, including Woman, Continuum, 2003 and lecturer at Roehampton College, University of Surrey); Annabel Brett (Cambridge historian and author of Liberty, Right and Nature, CUP, 2004); Christopher Insole (theologian, author of The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defence of Political Liberalism, SCM Press, 2004); and Nicholas Sagovsky (Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey).
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