Probing Human Dignity: Exploring Thresholds from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Probing Human Dignity from multiple disciplinary backgrounds by scholars from a variety of countries and different cultures is an intense intellectual and emotional venture. The intensity emerges from an encounter with Human dignity that challenges individuals, communities, and society at large to navigate different spheres of human action, including ethical, moral, religious, and legal realms. Difficulties arise in the attempt to bridge the conversation about Human Dignity across cultures and traditions. This volume addresses such difficulties, exploring new horizons of the discourse and offering a mosaic of the quest for Human Dignity.

Alas, the denial of a person’s dignity continues to manifest in contemporary life, through injustices often related to personal hardship, crisis, unrest, or upheaval. This collection confronts such injustices with sensitive, complex, nuanced, and academically rigorous engagement. 

Each chapter begins from the understanding that recognizing and investigating Human Dignity often occurs “at the threshold”, where in times of societal crisis or individual hardship questions of Human Dignity turn into ethical, moral, and legal dilemmas. The objective of this volume is to draw on theoretical and conceptual distinctions of Human Dignity in order to inform new perspectives that probe its ambiguity. The contributors offer greater clarity and push beyond existing thresholds to develop new paradigms that cross disciplinary lines while speaking to the goals and needs of post-modern societies and individuals. Each contributor crosses into new territory to examine a pressing legal or societal issue with a new lens.

The authors worked together as an international and interdisciplinary research group within the framework of the 2nd Intercontinental Academia of the UBIAS network (University-Based Institutes for Advanced Studies). This volume reflects their journey, their fruitful collaboration, and their scholarly endeavors. The result is a collection that serves as a fresh and exciting contribution to the contemporary Human Dignity discourse. 

Stephanie Arel is an Instructor at Fordham University's School of Theology. Previously, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and a visiting researcher at New York University (2017-2019). She is the author of Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Bearing Witness: The Wounds of Mass Trauma at Memorial Museums (Fortress Press 2023). She co-edited both Post-Traumatic Public Theology (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Ideology and Utopia in the Twenty-First Century: The Surplus of Meaning in Ricoeur's Dialectical Concept (Lexington 2018). She is a Compassion Fatigue Specialist and holds a certificate in treatment for trauma in the clinical setting from the New York Institute in Psychoanalysis.

Levi Cooper is originally from Melbourne, Australia. He teaches at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in law from Bar-Ilan University, as well as an LL.M. and LL.B. He is a member of the Israel Bar Association, and served as the internal auditor of the National Library of Israel Readers Association. He has held postdoctoral positions at University of Oxford and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Most recently he was a Visiting Academic at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt. His research focuses on legal history and interplays between Jewish legal writing and broader legal, intellectual, and cultural contexts. His book, Relics for the Present, offers a contemporary commentary on the Talmud. His forthcoming book Hasidic Relics, explores cultural aspects of Hasidism and their underlying religious meanings. Levi volunteers as a communal rabbi in Zur Hadassa, Israel

Vanessa Hellmann is a Senior Lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Bielefeld, taking a special interest in Constitutional Law. Following her studies in Law at the University of Bielefeld and the University of Edinburgh, sponsored by the German National Academic Foundation, she worked as a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Chair of Public Law at the University of Bielefeld (Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff, then Justice of the German Federal Constitutional Court). She completed her legal clerkship with assignments to the Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia, the law firm Hengeler Müller, and the German Federal Constitutional Court. For four years she was a Law Clerk at the German Federal Constitutional Court (Departments of Justices Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff, and now Vice President Prof. Dr. Doris König). She recently completed her book “No Legal Protection in German Electoral Law” and is currently working on a book tentatively titled “A Legal Doctrine of Constitutional Rights”.