Human Rights & Religion: the legacy of the Brazilian 1962 North-Eastern Conference for public theology and democracy

This project will investigate the outcomes of a religious Conference that reshaped the borders between human rights and religion in the 1960s, by changing the understanding of church and society relations in Latin America. Human rights and religion share a long history in Natural Law concepts and Theology but have recently been understood as conflicting languages. On the one hand, religious discourse has been presented as raising different and opposing expectations to those granted by human rights. On the other, human rights have been criticized for their compatibility and acceptance of social & economic inequality. In 2022, Brazilian protestant minorities celebrate the 60th anniversary of the 1962 North-eastern Conference whose title was shocking to both political and ecclesiastical authorities: “Christ and the Brazilian revolutionary process.” The focus of this Pilot project is to facilitate the writing of a grant proposal that will put together an original digital archive of video-interviews with those – then young – activists of religious and student organisations who were directedly involved in the 1962 Conference. This project will strengthen the position of a grant proposal to advance scholarship and develop new research methods to investigate the tensions between human rights & religion on a global scale.

People

	Name	Telephone	Email	Office
	Dr Marcus De Matos Senior Lecturer in Law T: +44 (0)1895 266896 E: marcus.dematos@brunel.ac.uk	+44 (0)1895 266896	marcus.dematos@brunel.ac.uk	Elliot Jaques 004

Outputs