The EPYC team recently found Youth For Human Rights great short intros to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for young people. Chris Marshall’s fantastic book: “Crowned With Glory and Honour: Human Rights in the Biblical Tradition” is part of my enthusiasm for teaching human rights as offering a point of resistance to the larger narratives of the Industrial Growth Military Complex where the absence of the Reign of Love is often so palatable. Being a big fan of Stanley Hauerwas I’ve been cautious of those who want to whittle down and make safe the dynamic struggle of the Biblical narrative into bite size easy ‘digestibles’ that abandon the ‘scandal of particularity’, the need for alternative communities and responsibility  (not just alternative rhetoric), for a cheap Enlightenment catholicity of “rights” that become easily co-opted,  increasingly individualised and impotent in the mists of market formed imaginations and a consumer moulded consciousness.

Yet Biblical scholar Chris Marshall (who I was crazy excited to meet earlier this year while speaking in New Zealand) has convinced me in of the usefulness of recovering the language of human rights in the matrix of narrative theology which he sees in 6 movements “creation, stewardship, covenant, incarnation, ecclesia, and consummation”. Chris much like N.T. Wright, Mike Parson, Glen Stassen and others confirmed my sneaking suspicion that some of the most rigorous Biblical scholarship with Anabaptist overtones comes from former Calvinists now converts to the nonviolence of Christ’s Kingdom.

and here are some of the clips that I thought were really put together well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOXPc08x_ZE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_apMfGRllpM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqib7xeGJ3k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqib7xeGJ3k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeczO7o47VA