Faith, hope, and love, traditionally called theological virtues, are central to Christianity. This book renews faith, hope, and love in the context of the many contemporary challenges in many unique ways. It is an ecumenical collection of papers, equally divided between Catholic and Protestant positions, that seek to radically renew the classical doctrine of faith, hope, and love, and argues for their essential connection to the praxis of justice. It contains eight different approaches, each represented by a distinguished theologian and addressing different aspects of the issues and followed by insightful and critical responses. It does not merely seek to renew the theological virtues but to also reconstruct them in the demanding context of justice and the contemporary world, nor is it simply a treatise on justice but a theoretical and practical reflection on justice as vital expressions of faith in God, hope in God, and love of God. A non-dogmatic and non-ideological approach, it accommodates both conservative and liberal positions, and avoids the separation of the theological virtues from the demands of the contemporary world as well as the separation of justice talk from the theological context of faith, hope, and love. It seeks above all to renew, not merely repeat, the classical doctrine of faith, hope, and love in the contemporary context of the urgency of justice, and to do so ecumenically, comprehensively, and from a variety of perspectives and aspects.

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without a single dissenting vote. The document was novel in declaring that every human being, without "distinction of any kind," possesses a set of morally authoritative rights and fundamental freedoms that ought to be socially guaranteed. Today, human rights have arguably become the cross-cultural moral framework and evaluative tool to measure the performance and even legitimacy of domestic regimes. But do human rights have genuine universal validity? Or are human rights simply Western concepts smuggled underneath a cloak of cultural triumphalism? Some suggest that the very idea of human rights must be premised upon a religious or metaphysical ideal--what scholars characterize as a "thick" or "maximalist" approach. Others suggest that we ground our conception of human rights on rational reasons that all can share, independent of any philosophical or religious cast--a "thin" or "minimalist" approach. Grace Y. Kao examines the strengths and weaknesses of these contending interpretations while also exploring, critically, the arguments of political philosopher John Rawls as well as the "capabilities" approach proposed by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In retrieving insights from a variety of these approaches Kao defends an account of human rights that straddles the minimalist-maximalist divide, one that links human rights to faith in social progress and to a conception of our common humanity and equal moral worth.