 This program is brought to you by Emory University. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome to this final session of our wonderful conference these past two days, the concluding keynote address by my dear friend and colleague, Professor Martin Marty. Over the past several years, I've had the privilege of introducing Professor Marty from this lectern. He makes it very easy for a repeat chairman like me, for he invariably has added four or five pages of impressive new accomplishments to his resume every time he returns. Professor Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and the Robert W. Woodruff Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Religious Studies at Emory University. He is the author of more than 50 books, the editor of some 20 more. Amongst his most recent titles, a wonderful new entry in the Penguin Live series called Simply Martin Luther, and a brand new book just out entitled When Faiths Collide. Professor Marty has won the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and literally hundreds of other medals and awards from learned societies and guilds throughout the world. He has received 75 honorary doctorates from universities on all continents, but one. The sole continental holdout so far Antarctica. He has served as president of the American Academy of Religion, president of the American Society of Church History, and president of the American Catholic Association. This last title, a particularly astonishing one for such a staunch Lutheran as Martin Marty. He has led many cutting edge projects on a variety of themes, including major projects in the 1990s on fundamentalism and on public religion. The past three years, he has been kind enough to co-direct our center's project on the child in law, religion, and society, of which this conference has been a signature event. Time Magazine calls Martin Marty the most influential interpreter of religion in our time. And what better person to lead us in our benedictory reflections. Will you please join me in welcoming Professor Martin Marty? I'm going to use one minute, as all the other speakers have done, for cordial purposes. And then I have 44 minutes to go. I want to thank Emory Law School, Frank Alexander, Acting Dean, and John Whitty, the staff, and students. I've gotten to know many of the law students along the way. The staff of the center, especially, among other things, they provided me with the world's only Emory University bowtie, custom made. They've done many other things. And Don Browning, you can tell, our scholarly and friendly relation from what he said. And that's the same with me. We have piled up many frequent flyer miles during these last three years along the way. I'm going to call my remarks, even so, comma, what then. Mr. Carter had the keynote. I have the coda. I was told, unlike all the other speakers, to come without anything. They all have their papers ready to go. And they could take the rest of the year off. And I have to go home now and write my paper. Because I was supposed to listen. And what I won't do is repeat what you heard. It's very condescending to assume that you couldn't have caught what I caught. But still, what I'm to say is to grow out of the proceedings of these days. Two years, one week and two hours ago, President Jimmy Carter issued in this room the challenge that this conference and this law school picked up. When he asked why couldn't one law school in America take it as its agenda, among others, to promote the ratification of the convention. In some senses, he may have almost thrown cold water on it yesterday when he said it's hopeless. And he's a hoping human being, if there ever was one. So when he says hopeless, I have to take it pretty seriously. And everybody did. I live more by Franz Kafka's in the fight between you and the world, back the world, than I do by utopianism. And Mr. Carter is also a realist, but he's also a hooper. And he promises to put energies into this if Emory Law School and the people influenced by it will continue to promote it. Why do we care about what he said? Well, he is former president. He's one of the great humanitarians, Nobel Prize winner, and a highly admired person. And among other things, he turned to the audience with 400 law students and a lot of divinity students and said, if I know Marty, this project will end with 19 books. Who are you gonna change the world? And he had a whole agenda for what people should do to change the world that afternoon, and many of them took him up, and the rest of us are in the wake of all this. We don't have to agree with him that it's hopeless, but I think that realism does color whatever we're going to do. Even so, what's more? Some say, even so, we'll keep working at it. And many of you, including many of the speakers, are doing that with good effect. Others, I think, are saying, and I've heard, that we may someday, somehow, get it ratified and it may not make that much difference. One of the flaws, I think, in the case so far is that we aren't able to point to enough places yet in the world where it's made a difference and can't clearly specify what it would hear. But I have great faith that that would happen and we will be keeping better records along the way. Whether or not it is ratified, I still think the question of even so what then is where we now take what's come up in the last day and a half and in a long project, which issues in books and publications. I get the title, and I've used it once before in some comment on Utopia, from Lewis Thomas, the great physician at Sloan Memorial Kettering Hospital, who wrote an essay called, To Err is Human. He said, we never say we learn through trial and triumph. We say we learn through trial and error. So suppose this thing were ratified tomorrow, well, we'd have a great triumph, would we have learned from it? Especially since most of us in this nation haven't even read it, so what? No, says Thomas, we don't learn from the error. We learn from when somebody notices that the specimen in the lab was there too long. The temperature too high. The calculation's wrong and it went wrong and then somebody says, oh, something went wrong, even so, what then? Even so, what then? In the case now of our future in relation to this promising document. Even so, what then? How might we think differently? How might we act differently? And so on. Well, the first thing I think that everyone who's interested in has to do is to get people to have a little sense of knowing what's in it. A DW Brogan, a British historian, once told of an American in the 19th century was running out of a town one evening, hot summer night, and he's steaming because they've tarred and feathered him. And this kind of interested this visitor and said, what was the issue? Well, we had a big argument, what was the big argument? It was about the Monroe Doctrine. Well, what was that? Well, I told him, I believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I love the Monroe Doctrine. I live by the Monroe Doctrine. I die for the Monroe Doctrine. I just have the faintest idea of what's in it. And I think that enthusiasm for the general thrust of a document like that is not nearly as satisfying as what we've heard here the day and a half where various people here have gone over it by molecule of ink and found all kinds of things with which to argue and with which to affirm. Mr. Carter, for example, picked out just one word and really lifted it. He said, everywhere. He really liked that word everywhere. These rights should be everywhere and he applied it to the geography of his own life and the difference it would make if the extensions of this were carried on elsewhere. People who read it might be shocked by it, here and there, might be inspired by it, but in any case, it would advance the cause of children's rights no matter where one stood in relation to various articles in it. Because if you would disagree, you have to do, we heard some creative reference to that this afternoon. If you disagree, you have to show why you disagree. You have to show how you're gonna advance children's rights on some other sets of terms. You don't have to agree with the document all the way in order to make it work. For some, let's say, knowing what's in it, should then move on to we should use it and push it further. Again, that was part of the keynote address of President Carter, while thwarted or frustrated in one set of rights being applied where we don't ratify it. He said there are just all other kinds of rights where he's putting his energies and these were the rights to food, shelter, security, protection, and all the rest. And he sees that as an expansion of this. Others see it negatively. If you give these rights, then you'll be on, quote, a slippery slope and really bad stuff will happen down the slope. I have never figured out why slippery slopes only go downhill. It may well be we're on a slippery slope and you just spend a little extra energy trying to get your footing and it might come up to something better along the way. Celebrating adult American rights, which he and almost everyone here said are quite luxurious and to be celebrated. But his would be adding these physical rights in the face of war, pestilence, disease, famine, shelter, medical limitations, seen as rights. So one set of rights can inspire another set of rights and we can push along the way. And I think that some of the more lyrical passages in this lead us to that. I've had to deal with other United Nations documents. I chaired a session in Brussels before the Cairo Conference on Women's Reproductive Rights and Migration and so on. 143 pages of six point type without margins and I think a bureaucratic machine spewed it out. There are some very beautiful phrases in here and it's well worth going to use it and then push it further. Number three, know what's in it, use it, push it further. We can learn to use it and how to use it. You can let it lie there. You can spread the word about it. But it can also just be inert. We have to make it inert. It's inert when it's not taken to the Senate for debate. It's inert when people don't know about it. But it doesn't have a magic character to it at all. It is a written document so you can proceed from there. Sam Golden once said an oral agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on. And so with this kind of thing too, the fact that it's written doesn't do a lot. It's what we do with it along the way. And enough people at the faculty and the student body and the special programs at Emory University and in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion have put energy into it already and though the project officially ends in about 30 minutes, we'll be publishing for some months and years to come. We'd like to think that that energy is going to keep going and spread to other law schools, other divinity schools beyond Candler and so on have along the way. And we know when we use it that it's not going to be in perfect shape. I mentioned a couple of folks the other night at dinner that I had recently read an interview with the late Artie Shaw, the greatest clarinet of his time. Says a Benny Goodman factor here, you're just sorry. Who retired at age 50 and why did he retire? Lived 40 more years. They told me I was as close to perfection as you can get so why go further? And they said, how are you doing now at 90? Well, I got a new knee so I'm not perfect but even when I was perfect I wasn't perfect. And I think that's after you look at documents like this. You look at the unfinishedness and instead of assailing it for its unfinishedness, you ask how you can live with its logic and promote it. I also like to quote Winston Churchill who tells of a man who risked his life to rescue a little boy who was drowning in the river. The guy could hardly swim himself and he pulls him ashore, he had great triumph and he's artificial respiration and gasping and just making it and long comes little boy's mother and says, where's Johnny's cap? Not further downstream. So we got Johnny here at least and we got the near perfection on which to work. By near perfection I don't mean that the center substance, the kind of things we were debating this afternoon is nearly perfect but I'm saying the form it comes to us gives us a lot to work with. Number four, I believe it provides a character for development beyond it and we have to learn ways to do it. And I think we saw some of that exemplified today. Apart from this kind of forum, these issues usually get discussed, we heard in military terms, culture wars or in terms of argument. And you can't have a good law school without argument. At least I don't want my attorney not to know how to argue. You can't have a good med school without argument. I'd like to have them argue about what that cell means and what that cell means and what that medication means. I don't think you have a good divinity school without argument. You're making choice all the way or you have to argue but that's not the only thing. And in the nature of American life today, most argument goes past each other because everybody has armed along the way. Well, my colleague David Tracy and the British philosopher Michael Oakshot make a distinction. Argument is determined by the answer, conversation, dialogue by the question. Argument, I have a proposition and say this document for example and it's understanding of the rights of children. And then I must convince you or you me, defeat you, convert you, humiliate you, exile you or whatever. I'm not likely going to learn a lot because if I enter that argument, I better have armed myself with all of the supporting evidence I could. Conversation is of a very different character and I think that the issue is before us whenever you talk about rights and whenever you talk about children, there are more questions than answers. One quick illustration. If I come in and say I'm for school vouchers and the group parts right away for again is a very different thing than if I say what are the best means we would have for advancing the education of young people in America. All kinds of ideas will come up, some of them not thought of earlier along the way. So maybe the public isn't ready for or wasn't ready for having been brought to the Senate for ratification. During that questioning though, I think we might well ask, why did 192 other nations ratify it? They must have found something in it with which they will face other nations or address problems of their own and that's really a good question. Well, one question could be, did they do it for the sake of hypocrisy? All of us who are honest observers and reporters know that an awful lot of nations assigned that have horrible records on the rights of children. Is it nice to have that on the wall? Reminder, hey, we signed that. Could it be they did it in order to enhance the search for rights? We'd like to think that in their own nations. Did they do it because they wanted to be exemplars to other? They'd advanced pretty far already. They have a good record. A lot of nations have good records and by signing it you become part of a community, a common discourse, have an influence on the world community. Or could it just be that they care about children in a special way? I'd like to think that the most important word we're talking about here is the child or children. But then in that questioning, we also have to ask as we often heard here, why is it so seldom cited in our courts and in other courts? Is it irrelevant to many? Is it redundant? They've solved everything that's there already? Is it inhibiting and they're afraid to cite it would force them to move into further action? Is it intrusive in their own polities and constitutional life and understandings of children and law? These are all open questions. And even though we've been studying this now for two years, one week and two hours, I don't have answers to those questions. And I will have to keep pursuing them. Part three. Part one is called Carter. Part two is called Even So What Then. Part three and this relates to Professor Smolens and well, all three this afternoon on confronting opposition to it in the United States. If you want to advance the conversation, you have to begin by understanding. Some opposition to it may very well be just a result of lethargy. It isn't big on somebody's screen. One of my professors always said, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to lethargy. A lot of us in history say the main law of history is inertia. We're a busy people and we have a lot of things until our case is pressed. We don't wake up in the morning and say, how can I extend some other liberties? So it may well be that a lot of people haven't understood it and then it bobs up on their screen and they think that's just not quite for us. But we're more interested in the more overt type. What I valued in this afternoon's conversation is they all force us, all three of them, to go back and try to understand the other. And sometimes we're abrupt, there were arguments, but there's also a conversation. In the six year project that I co-directed on understanding religious fundamentalisms in the modern world, our two main models were one from Spinoza and the other from William James. Spinoza in the Troctatus Politica says, when I have set out to understand complex human action, I have made a sedulous effort, sedulocuravi, not to laugh, not to cry, not to denounce, but to understand because we knew our project was worthless. There are a lot of funny things in fundamentalism and the people who study it. And maybe over a beer or late in the day we do some of that fun stuff, but it doesn't open the understanding. There are a lot of things to cry about both sides and denounce, but our task was to understand so that maybe state departments and media and academics and religious bodies might approach the subject somewhat differently. And the other was from William James who urged, as so many speakers did here, to get close up, to deal with the particulars. The child, the children in that African village, the children in this public school where they're debating, getting up close. William James once said, you can never understand something if you don't do some categorizing and classifying and so on. That's how you do the comparative method and you compare that way. But he said, if you could interview a crab, the last thing you would want is to be classified a crustacean. I'm not a crustacean, I'm a crab and I'm gonna be taken forward, and he puts it in capital letters, myself, myself. We learned in that project that the way to understand fundamentalism was with a tape recorder, hearing from a lot of people what they're thinking. That hasn't happened enough with this yet. I think it happened in some of the nations where ratification came and was put to work, but we haven't yet heard why and we get some glimpses from very informed people here who have made their contributions. But I'm not sure we've heard enough of just in a sense the ordinary folks. As far as I can discern, and we had that summarized in several sessions, again this afternoon, one of them I think deals with sovereignty issues, authority, national authority, authority of the states in our federal republic. Sometimes it's a disguise for other concerns and we've seen people here probing back to say the real issue is so and so. I think most on both sides do begin with care, care of the child, be it through parent-child relations, the family, or the extended family, and I don't think we've paid enough attention to that yet in a project because there are so many places in the world where so often the United States, against all statistics, family sort of means, I used to define it, a family in America in the 1950s when I was a pastor of a suburban church and I defined the nuclear family as two parents, two children, and a psychiatrist because you had to make it work with just those four people. Healthy people up in Appalachia and the blacks who had moved into big cities, uncles and aunts and cousins and everybody else are in on the care and where one doesn't, somebody else supplements. I think we should do a lot of study on that line. Rosenthal Hussie says the tribe is the, he calls it a tribe, extended family. The network of people who are important to you. The Don Browning's word attach people or not just parents, they attach to you. He calls them the coosh, the womb, the matrix of values. Family is too brief to generate those values. My wife and I always compared our family with our kids a lot to the art form of a ballet. It's dark, the lights go on, music starts, you sweat and dance and so on, lights go out, it's over, there's no film of it, that's it. That's how it is, children come in and there they are. If you're it, that's it. No, it's a long running kind of thing and many of these values come from other generations and can be revisited. Some things in the discussions of rights in England in 1688 and US in 1787 and UN in 1948 have a lot to tell us for today and we consult the generations through our books and our reading, but we also can do it through living contact. But let's not underestimate the value and certainly law schools can't and divinity schools can't and universities can't. The value of confronting texts, however they come to us. I would like to quote Machiavelli who doesn't often get quoted benignly in religious discourse who unlike everybody else in this room just being Friday afternoon is ready to go home and go in the library and put on our PJs and our sweatsuits and so on and read. Machiavelli says, I come from the streets of Florence full of dust or mud, can't wait to get home to take off those dusty clothes where I garb myself, where I clad myself in raiment regal and courtly because for the next four hours I'm going to be with the great minds of the ages and I will converse with them and they will converse with me. The conversation, the dialogue we're talking about is a fresh encounter with pages and they take on a new light. I can't picture any of us, I can't go home from this weekend without revisiting some of the pages and they'll be speaking to me in a different way. That's part of what has to go on and I think that in so far as we line ourselves up with all the answers in advance we aren't going to get that along the way. I think we also saw that alongside the issue of sovereignty and the issue of care are at root and finally religious issues. I made a little note of my margin here today. Did you ever notice how the temperature goes up when religion comes up? I don't care where you are in the world it gets more interesting from the temperature angle. When the Fundamentalism Project started in 1988 my colleagues Scott Appleby and I quoted Admiral Stansfield Turner who had been the head of the CIA when the Iranian Revolution occurred that caught us off guard and on issues that answers February 4th, 1979 somebody said Admiral Turner how could the CIA and all the intelligence agencies have missed this whole plot? Oh he said it wrong. We pay attention to everything that's important in a nation like Iran. We knew their garb who were the Shador. We knew their cinema. We knew their banking. We knew their universities. We knew their village life. The only thing we paid no attention to it all was religion because everybody knows religion has no power in the modern world. Scott Appleby eight years later said that he used to teach at St. Xavier University in Chicago to nice little classes and he said last week I met with the War College next week I'm meeting with Colin Powell long before he was Secretary of State and he also met with Secretary of State. He said I can tell you one thing the State Department has got religion today. And all you need to do is consult today's newspaper to see how it is pervasive. I also in the Park Ridge Center and the Public Religion Project found you could talk about almost any medical ethical issue on a certain level of serenity but when religion came in it changed the character. That's a compliment to religion even if it is a problem for dialogue. It's a problem for religion but I don't think that it means that that's the end of the conversation. When the various parties and I resist the notion that there are only two in all of these discourses when the various parties meet each other they begin with I think a sense of revulsion of what they're hearing because it's the other, it's the stranger. Georg Simmel wrote a great essay on the sociology of the stranger and in this book When Faiths Collide I make the big distinction between the stranger and the belonger. You have it figured out a certain way. This is our red state, blue state. This is our party, your party. This is our religion, your religion. We belong here and I'm not sure you do and Simmel says when the stranger comes he or she brings qualities that the group did not already have. They can be better qualities but they will be challenging qualities because they're different. And therefore they will always first come on as the greatest measure of alienation. Hellford North Whitehead once said great ideas often enter the world through entangling and quote even disgusting alliances but that does not take away from our responsibility to discern what is the great idea behind it all. And there are great ideas about the care of the family and parent-child relations and the civic order and sovereignty. There are great ideas here that people wrestle with as long as there have been great books and as long as people are sitting at campfires and in caves and around in their living rooms and in churches and synagogues and temples. Sometimes it's presented today as if we are bipolar and only that. The Christian vote versus everybody else. And I think the media haven't helped that along a lot. They take a few polls of some Ohioans and they say they have values and so that's values and that's the Christian vote. There are all kinds of Christians as we kept hearing about four of you this afternoon all kinds of Christians and you can't type them that easily you have to ask like William James does behind your classification. You crab you, I want to take you seriously for yourself and you often surprise. And I think it's that measure of surprise where the beginning of learning comes about and why I hope that this afternoon and this day and a half dialogue is only a beginning for many of us when we deal with this kind of issue. So these religious ideas I think can be taken up in a certain way. Professor Smolen if I had to disagree with one of your lines today you said you can't change somebody else's religion. Depends on how you define religion. I think in the depths and core of our being we will look at the universe a certain way by ontology, by conversion, by community but they're just an awful lot of things that we didn't anticipate were negotiable that become negotiable. John Noonan, Judge John Noonan has a new book out on the church that cannot change, Changes, in which he takes four major cases in Catholicism where officially and formally there were changes. Usury used to be sinful. I don't know a Catholic doesn't like to take interest. Be nice, I'm out of the pension plan in a hurry. Slavery, another illustration. You can take these illustrations in which things have happened. And so in the American communities too we used to pose a lot of things. Now is that a change in religion? I think if you had reached somebody in South Carolina in 1830 they would have said pro-slavery is their religion. They'd hear a sermon every week on it. It was in their Bible studies and so on and the abolitionists were doing the same and there's change. The final session of the Second Vatican Council exactly 40 years ago this month signed a declaration on religious liberty. It really does say we were wrong. We used to teach that error has no rights. So as we got 51% we can take over and error has no rights. And they say it has rights. Catholicism formally changed with nostra etate. It didn't change in the sense that it believes that the fullness of the divine truth is in the Catholic Church. But there are the separated brothers and sisters in the first concentric and then the Jews who are of the covenant that God hasn't revoked. Islam also has the prophets and a scripture and there is even some light in Hinduism and Buddhism. And Pope John the 23rd used to say and then there are the people of goodwill who know not God who serve these purposes too. That's really quite different from the earlier teaching. And yet as long as that core remained of the belief that the full truth is in Catholicism they hadn't changed their religion in those terms. So I think in this sense we have to ask what becomes negotiable in the various cultures? And every group does a lot of that changing. The issue is what changes can there be congruent with their profound beliefs and negotiable in their various cultures? That's certainly true for their parent child and family relations. On one level I think the dominant book, the Bible, the scriptures, Old and New Testament which speaks to let's say 80% of the American people has to be taken more seriously than the others on this front. Though as was pointed out this afternoon there are many things for example in Quran that address family values are a great deal. Martin Luther King was observed how did he try to change a culture? And a British sociologist of religion said, Max Weber says there are two ways you can change the world in the light of a text. You could say it is written but I say unto you that's the dangerous way. You could get killed. Or you could say it is written and I insist. You can get killed that way too as Martin Luther King showed. But what he meant was that you can take a document born in the white heat of a tradition's birth or early development that speaks directly to issues that can later get compromised or submerged. And King always said in my one pocket I can talk to 100% of the people theoretically because it's the Declaration of Independence and it's doctrine of rights in its constitution which is to assure the rights and neither of it are we all getting and I insist we get them in his other pocket 80% of the American people, Jews, Christians in particular, for them it's Isaiah, for the Christians it's John the Baptist and Jesus. And he would quote for all the faiths and no faiths all these prophetic passages about justice rolling down and streams and so on. And it moved people. It's on those terms I think that in our project we're spending some energy on these primal documents which I think all parties do well to look back at. Again there's some surprises there. I don't know who I'm going to offend by saying this but try to find family values in Jesus words quoted in the gospels. I believe that the Christian faith and the New Testament and the Bible are very supportive of the things called family values but try to find it in the gospel porches of Jesus. I'm sitting next to my sister-in-law in a little church in Monticello, Illinois a couple years ago and the poor pastor was struggling with the assigned texts for the day she's sitting next to her daughter-in-law and the text was I have come to Jesus to set mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter had gone and I got a little nudge she said we didn't need a text to help us along on that one and he did what any good preacher would do he ducked that part of the text and found a safe part and I thought oh that's how it goes two weeks later I had the preach and the text was I have come to set father against son and son against father. Oh here comes your family Jesus my family my family those who hear my word. Now you can probe in the context we've been saying that these two days and you can find plenty of support for these but you can't just take it literally you have to ask that. I think that you can make out of the Pauline writings and several of the prophets a better case for family values of adoption and foster care than you can of just being born. Professor Stevenson Messner of Dubuque wrote a book on theology of adoption I never knew this not being a Calvinist but in the sequence of doctrines it's justification adoption, sanctification that's pretty good isn't it? Right at the heart of things you have adoption between God accepting you and you carrying out the stuff I mean anybody can be born but to be chosen adopted and I think that there's a big message there about family values that you get when you have a document like this that says let's probe what in Donna's Aristotle's Aquinas and Browning's how's that Aristotle Aquinas and Browning in their word about attachment and rights. I think that a document like this forces us to rethink what we mean by rights and what claims we make not just for children but as we've heard for a day and a half rights of the child and its enlargement. Hannah Arendt in her book about the Constitution called on revolution says every religious group today likes to claim that it invented religious liberty. She said before you claim that you at least ought to send a card of thanks to modernity because what we call religious liberty which all sides in American religion adopt was not really around till the 18th century. I mean what was God doing from the first to the 18th century if we invented it? John Whitty and I agreed yesterday that there's one at least like Tantius. We both like like Tantius. I read like Tantius and he sounds like James Madison. What image of God you have? How loathsome an image of God if you think that God has to coerce faith and love. And there were a couple of that. And there were a couple of left-wing Puritans and then came the Quakers and all of a sudden in the dialogue of what was called the Enlightenment came a quickening. Thomas Jefferson and the Baptist together give us all kinds of change. I think the documents like this force us to go back and ask what are the particular treasures we give that will solidify if we're religious? The values of the rights of the child. Next part, to do this what do we need? We need, and we heard this from many speakers, we need a better story. We get stuck in a version of the story of what we are in the US, what the UN is, what the declarations are, what the convention is and it has to be enriched along the way. That's very difficult and I could hear in Fessler Browning's approach today. The overtones of all right, you've quoted Aristotle, you've quoted Aquinas, you've quoted our tradition in this part of the West. Any of us who've ever dealt as John Whitty has with the Declaration of Rights around the world, you find that you can't take them for granted at all. You cite them and you might get set back instead of ahead. You look for some places where they overlap, they're all for human dignity, but then you go on from there and who do you cite and how do you cite it? When I was chairing that session in Brussels, preparing for the Cairo Conference, there was a Vatican delegate there and every time it came to birth control issues, he would read a canon. One of them says that every conjugal act has to have a procreative intent. A 55-year-old Hindu from India said, I'm a widower, I'm recently married. When we get together, does that mean we have to procreative intent? And he backed up and he found another canon along the way. There was always one more that you could do. Well, couldn't we at least have a consensus statement on how all of these rights are derived from our common belief in God? Michio Araki was there, Divinity alum, who said, I'm a Buddhist, I'm as religious as you are, but we don't have God. We have holy emptiness and words like that. Well, then why don't we just agree on the sacred? Well, that's how you Westerners smuggle God back in. We have sacred shrines, we have sacred events, we have sacred texts, sacred person. We don't have the sacred. You have to constantly, in this dialogue, find ways, and in the pluralism of America, still you can count on the vast majority arguing over a particular book, but there are other alternatives, and we have to find a language for that along the way. Alistair McIntyre in his extremely pessimistic, but discerning book called After Virtue argues that because we don't share Aristotle and Aquinas anymore, we can no longer produce an ethic that's only emotive. I'm against abortion, means I find it abhorrent personally, or I have bad feelings about it. And the Andy says, what can we do? Well, we could do what the Benedictines did in the last Dark Ages. They kept the monasteries there, they kept the lights on, they kept the books in the library, they kept the dialogue going, and maybe we have to do that. But then in a later book, he also says you can get a long way by asking of what story or stories am I apart? I think that this declaration of children's rights is asking us to see in what ways we are part of a common human story, of the whole globe, of people who don't share the same faith, don't share the same philosophy, but share the care for the child and ask how is it best delivered? And the rights of the child and ask how are they best assured? We're doing this at a time, in other words, when there is a great deal more of religious resource available in all of this. When I knew that I would be part of this conference, I did what everybody else did, it's called research, namely I hit Google. And if you put the word of Fatima in there, along with the convention, you will get up writings from the Catholic right who are vehemently angry with the Vatican City for having approved the universal, this convention. In other words, the Catholic right is really nervous. The Pope says it's fine, but they didn't want it along the way. Well, I think that's a good chance for everybody to ask again, what is it that we do believe? What is it that's there? Of the child. Those who study medical ethics can often find that they're discussing philosophy, they're discussing budgets, they're discussing strategies and so on. And you forget that what you're really talking about is the patient. The nurse exists for the patient. The doctor exists for the patient. The patient brings something to it. All the while, while we get better at our part of things, we get more remote from that. Wendy Charlton wrote a book some years ago, the University of Notre Dame, called In My Professional Opinion, in which she shows how you enter med school with a broad scope of interest, but to become a good physician in the second year, you have to learn the lingo. It's the only efficient way to go about it, but you forget the others. Law school, I think it happens. Divinity school, it happens. And you find yourself getting very good at a part of it, but it's a lot harder to know that it keeps a larger picture available. I think that the voice of theology and religion is here in a time of religious resurgence around the world. I think the errors of the enlightenment always thought that every time you looked out the window, there'd be less religion. And every time you found religion, it would be less intense and impassioned until it sort of ran away. I think the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, when they chartered us to study fundamentalisms around the world, thought we would be chronicling this kind of thing, and we find the opposite. Ask President Carter about what's happening, and as far as he's concerned, the world is really geosifying. There might be 3,000 fewer Christians in the Northern world than there were 24 hours ago, but there are 18,000 more in sub-Saharan Africa in 24 hours. And the changes in Latin America, Catholic and Pentecostal and mainline Protestant, dealing with its future, bringing to very different cultures concerns, but I think if they start with who is the child, what's special about the child, what do the religious texts say? Why in the prophets does it say a little child shall lead them? In the book I'm writing for this series, I call it The Mystery of the Child, and an epigraph is from Georges Bernanus, who has the priest in the diary of a country priest, say, in all history, no more terrifying words were ever said than those of Jesus when he said, unless you change and become like a little child, you shall never enter the kingdom. Was the child innocent? No, the child was vulnerable and knew it. The child is receptive, responsive, marginal, like most women, most poor, most races, and it sort of stands in for them along the way. And once you assure rights there, they do get contagious. President Carter used one word, I think only one sentence, but I think it ought to color a lot of our searches along the way. He thought that rights would best advance both in the convention sense and in the physical extension sense, if our nation and everyone in it were more generous. And we heard statistics this morning that show the many ways of indicating limits on our nation's generosity, including to be open to exploring what these other 192 nations are doing and caring about. Fine book appeared this year by Arthur Frank, a medical anthropologist at the University of Calgary called The Renewal of Generosity, subtitled Health, Illness, and How to Live. And his epigraph is from his mentor, Marcus Aurelius, who said, now you have wandered everywhere and you have learned everything. Have you learned how to live? I think that when you take a project involving the vulnerable and the marginal and those who naturally can't assert their rights, unless others care, you find that you learn a great deal about all the rest of how to live. And that's why I think these projects on the child of which I've been a part for three years, and this conference can make their own contribution for the many law students and divinity students and Atlantans and anybody else who happens to be here who's not gonna be a specialist in the rights of the child. But the generosity of spirit called forth there, I think will guide us all along the way. I hereby resign all my duties except a manuscript I owe you that grows out of my paper today. Thank you. Professor Marty, your resignation is rejected. You will always be our teacher, you will always be our inspirer, and you'll always be our friend, and you will always be welcome at this wonderful lectern. I hope that you will join me in a second round of applause because we need to start practicing. We need to start practicing because we have to recognize and give thanks to a number of folks that have made this wonderful conference so wonderful. First and foremost, I wanna recognize our two conference conveners, Johann Wenderweiver and Jeremy Gunn, working under the benign inspiration of Dean Frank Alexander. I hope that you will join me in applause for their work in organizing this event and allowing us to be here. Great trial lawyers know that two thirds of the victory turns on picking the right jury. And Johann Wenderweiver and Jeremy Gunn with the inspiration of Dean Alexander have picked the right jury, and that is the collection of wonderful speakers that we have had at this lectern and at this panel today and yesterday. And I hope you will allow, you guys can stand up and allow us to applaud you for your wonderful contributions to our dialogue and conversation. Behind the scenes at every great trial and every great play is the choreographers who are invisible, and it's just because they're invisible that they are so valuable. In this case, the choreographers are the dream team of our Center for the Study of Law and Religion. My dear colleagues, April Bogle, Eliza Ellison, Anita Mann, Melanie Still, Amy Wheeler, and Janice Wiggins who have planned this event and have orchestrated all of our events, and I hope they will stand and receive our applause of thanks robustly. If you wanna know how to put on a conference, any kind of event, you come to any one of those and they will instruct you with generosity. I also wanna recognize Corky Gallo and Scott Andrews who have been in the AV booth and have always recorded our proceedings so generously throughout, and again, are here today to record our proceedings which will be on our website, and I hope that you will enjoy them at your leisure in the course of the weeks ahead. Corky and Scott, if you're here, if we could recognize you. One of the wonderful things about having events at Emory Law School is the extraordinary spirit of generosity and cooperation by the staff who just pitch in after hours and simply allow us to avail ourselves of their fine services and good spirit, and I'd like to recognize a number of folk on the Emory Law School staff who have simply pitched in suesponte the last few days, as we lawyers like to say, and those are Michael Ossabel, Andy Boyles, Merida Craddock, Martha Fagan, Cynthia Jordan, Chanika Morrow, Karla Murphy, Michelle Papato, Daphne Powell, Carol Tate, Pat Thomas, Cindy Woods, and Veronica Wright, and I'd like to recognize and thank them. And finally, no event can go on without money, and we have been generously supported by the Pew Charitable Trust and the John Templeton Foundation who send greetings from afar. We also have been supported by Stephen Post and his colleagues in the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love at Case Western Reserve University and by the Emory International Law Review who will be publishing our proceedings this spring, and I wanna recognize especially John Egan, the Editor-in-Chief, and Andrea Thomas who have been so generous in their planning of this event and in their willingness to sponsor and publish our proceedings this spring if we could ask them to stand and receive our recognition. For those of you that are at this law school for the first time, I hope you will come back many times. For those of you that are returnees, I hope you will return yet again to participate with us on our center and various events to avail yourself for the wonderful resources of the faculty and the staff and the students here. We have a number of public events that will be posted regularly on our center website, which you can see on your program. There's a special event that we have every spring which is the Randolph-Thrawer Symposium, and the Emory Law Journal is the organizer of that, and this year it is on interactive federalism filling the gaps. And some of the issues that we have talked about, especially the federalism obstacle to ratification of the UN Convention, will be amongst the things under conversation. I commend that forum to you. There's a little flyer outside advertising it, but it's Thursday, February 16, all day in this auditorium. And I hope you will come back for that and for many other events and that you will be in contact and touch with us as we continue our work. We appreciate so much for being here for making this such a wonderful success, and I hope you will join me outside in the atrium to enjoy a lovely reception together to bid our final adieu. Thank you so much. The preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University.