Green to explore religion and human rights horizon

February 4, 2008
Green to explore religion and human rights horizon

By stacey Harwell

M. Christian Green ’95L has returned to Emory Law as the Alonzo McDonald Family Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Study of Law and Religion where she is researching religious human rights issues of the new millennium.

Green, who worked on the CSLR project “The Child in Law, Religion, and Society” as a Spruill Fellow, most recently was a visiting lecturer on ethics at Harvard Divinity School.
Green will explore the legal aspects of religious human rights issues at the national, regional and international levels.

“The terrain of religion and human rights has changed completely since we did this work in the early 1990s,” says Green, who worked on similar issues as an Emory student. She cites the breakup of the Soviet Union, the more realized effects of economic and cultural globalization on the understandings of human rights, and terrorism as changing agents that have reshaped the horizon of her work.

Green’s work is part a three-year CSLR project titled “Law, Religion, and Human Rights in International Perspective” funded by the Henry Luce Foundation Inc. The project is designed to make CSLR research on religion and human rights available to activists, public policy leaders, and media experts, and to assess the current state and future questions of religion and human rights that will confront different legal communities around the world.

After graduating from Emory, Green received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, concentrating on religion, gender and ethics. She is working on a book tentatively titled “Feminism and Fatherhood: Justice, Care and Gender in the Family,” which explores the intersection of fatherhood and feminist ethics, an intersection rarely made, and then problematically.

“We seem to have shifted from an interest in fatherhood in the 1990s to a new focus on ‘perfect mothers,’ which some are identifying as reflecting the generally conservative politics of our times and, in some respects, a new emphasis on security and the home after 9/11,” Green says.