On Forgiveness

Оглавление

Richard Holloway. On Forgiveness

Contents

Religion without Religion

Chapter 1

Reclaiming the Future

Chapter 2

Managing the Chaos

Chapter 3

Redeeming the Chaos

Chapter 4

Notes. Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Bibliography

Recent books by the same author

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Отрывок из книги

For Desmond Tutu

where there is the unforgivable.

.....

It would be best, in short, if we could get along without prophecy and claims to knowledge of the forces which determine history – if generous hope could sustain itself without such reassurances. Some day perhaps we shall have a new text to give our children – one which abstains from prediction yet still expresses the same yearning for fraternity as does the New Testament, and is as filled with sharp-eyed description of our most recent forms of inhumanity to each other as the Manifesto. But in the meantime we should be grateful for two texts which have helped make us better – have helped us overcome, to some degree, our brutish selfishness and our cultivated sadism.3

I shall make more use of the work of Jacques Derrida in this book than that of Richard Rorty, but I believe that both are talking about a process of Christianising the world without any necessary reference to the Church as such. In his short but powerful essay On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida, in writing about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, discusses the relatively new concept of a ‘crime against humanity’:

.....