Gathered into the new power and independence won in Jesus Christ, the church of his people enacts a distinct politics consonant with his new humanity. This chapter describes the core constellation of practices that give shape to this politics, finding in the table and in the rule of Christ a politics of social renewal that moves in emancipation from capitalism and into the forgiveness and peacemaking needed to sustain political discernment and communal cohesion.

Starting from Dennis T. Olson’s suggestion of the theme of the change of generations as the key to a theological interpretation, this chapter deepens the analysis of this theme and considers how Numbers addresses questions of sin, God’s “visiting the iniquity” on the third to fourth generation, and the possibility of forgiveness of sin.

How should criminal law come to grips with the banality of evil – the phenomenon of a normal person who is unable to tell right from wrong, and who commits grave crimes under circumstances that make it hard for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong? Those circumstances include not only the enthusiasm of Eichmann’s superiors” to “In Eichmann’s case, those circumstances include not only the enthusiasm of his superiors for the Final Solution but also the very nature of Nazi legality, which the chapter analyzes through Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” where the law in books forbids murder but the dictator’s will supersedes the law in books without repealing it. The problem that preoccupies Arendt is that under these circumstances Eichmann and his ilk lack the subjective mens rea that “civilized jurisprudence” demands to justify punishment. At times she flirts with the idea that unforgivable crimes cannot be punished; the criminals can only be “eliminated.” The chapter argues that this is a mistake. That leaves the question of how to justify punishing criminals who lack subjective mens rea. The chapter concludes with a proposal that thoughtlessness, abdication of judgment, and culpable credulousness are a sufficient mens rea – and thus that the solution to Arendt’s problem is the banality of evil itself.

In the course of advocating forward-looking punishment, Plato opened up a specific line of attack on retributivism. He characterized backward-looking punishment as irrational, bestial, and motivated by revenge. This gave rise to a debate over the moral status of revenge and the closely associated emotion of anger, which drew in and divided philosophers from Aristotle to Camus and beyond. Of our two pioneer abolitionists, it was Pelli rather than Beccaria who attacked retributivism directly, following a line taken by the Stoic Seneca on vengeance and anger in succession to Plato. Pelli and later opponents of retributivism have been unable to deliver it a knock-out blow, for the reason that, like its standard-bearer the Lex Talionis, retributivism is grounded in the gut feeling, part rational, part emotional, that we are responsible for the evil that we do, that crime merits equivalent or proportionate punishment: that there is in effect a ‘good’ vengeance. This was, and is, reflected in public opinion and in the attitude and practice of judicial and political establishments, whatever some philosophers might argue.

This chapter reviews the literature on responses to wrongdoing in close relationships. We begin by discussing what we know about transgressions as they occur in relationships. We then explore research and theorizing on three related but distinct ways of responding to wrongdoing (forgiveness, unforgiveness, and revenge) that vary in the nature of the response, the research attention they have attracted among those who study relationships, and the extent to which they are viewed as appropriate, desirable, and healthy. We also consider directions for future research and comment on how current methodology and theory can be extended in this area. We ultimately encourage relationship scholars to approach investigation of relational wrongdoing with openness to the possibility that forgiveness may not always and inevitably be the best way forward by exploring when, for whom, and under what circumstances both forgiveness and its less favourably viewed alternatives produce desirable versus undesirable outcomes.

As Kamari Maxine Clarke likewise explores in her chapter, the intersection of rights and “transitional justice” in diverse situations has become one of the defining features of our time. Narrating the classic role of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid, Clarke dramatizes the struggle over the meaning of transition, distinguishing between the “moralistic” goal of forgiveness and the more confrontational demand for accountability. For Clarke, the performativity of justice – it is always rendered by someone – means the history of human rights needs to be equally attentive to when it is not provided or when crimes are perpetrated or mistakes made in its name. What we see is that particular transitional justice speech acts enable the reproduction of particular types of power.

Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

To be compassionate is to care about others specifically in opposition to their suffering or deficiency. While the distress of compassion is paradigmatic of the virtue, a wide range of emotion types – gratitude, anger, fear, joy, and so forth – can express it. Aristotle offers an analysis of the emotion of compassion as entailing propositions (1) that the other is suffering, (2) that the other doesn’t deserve the suffering, and (3) that oneself is vulnerable to the kind of suffering one sees in the other. In dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s exposition and adaptation of Aristotle’s analysis of the emotion of compassion, this chapter compares Aristotelian compassion with the compassion that is commended in the New Testament. Differences between the two turn on differences in the concept of suffering, in the presence of a concept of forgiveness, and in the locus of commonality.

Chapter 5 discusses the various timelines involved in the question of the imprescriptibility of atrocity crimes. I distinguish between four timelines involved in imprescriptibility and assess these from the viewpoint of legal values and philosophical debates on forgiveness. Taking the perspective of the judge, the chapter ends by spelling out what is at stake in the judgement on an imprescriptible international crime.

The chapter’s first section develops the book’s underlying argument that the moral psychology of violation involves synthesising metaphysical expression and its metapsychological grounds. Its second section engages with Martha Nussbaum’s argument in Anger and Forgiveness (2016) that we should understand guilt and forgiveness without reference to metapsychology, and only in terms of unconditional love leading to eudaimonic social ‘Transition’. Against this, I argue that guilt and forgiveness remain morally important and we see this in the parable of the prodigal son. Where Nussbaum argues that the father’s unconditional love sets aside questions of forgiveness, I suggest that such moral questions between a father and son remain at stake. A third section offers a ‘case study’ of guilt and forgiveness in the dialogue between Jo Berry, whose father died in the IRA Brighton bombing of 1984, and Patrick Magee, one of the bombers. This shows how difficult moral dialogues around blame, guilt and forgiveness are central to reconciliation, though this may be blocked by surrounding unresolved social and political questions. Overall, connecting metaphysics and metapsychology enables us to see why moral transactions (distinguished from legal ones) and social transitions are both necessary for reconciliation.

If Chapter 4 develops the ontology of guilt and forgiveness, this chapter explores its moral phenomenology as a practical engagement of love after violation. I argue first for an account of love based on Roy Bhaskar’s conception of its five circles: in terms of its relation to self, to the other, to the relation of self and other, to self, other and the wider community, and self and other in their ontological depth as unique individuals. These five forms of love are then explored in relation to the experiences of victims and perpetrators in The Forgiveness Project (Cantacuzino 2015). Forgiveness involves both a ‘giving to’ and a ‘giving up’, and this can lead to a profound sense of identification between a victim and a perpetrator. It is different for each person and how it develops also depends on the broader social setting in which it occurs. Forgiveness can be understood either as an ethical and metaphysical phenomenon (dispositive humility) or as a law-related institutional practice (an exchange relation). The latter recasts forgiveness in ways compatible with the criminal justice system and links it to the tendency to punish rather than reconcile those caught up in violation.

The Joseph story has money the brothers paid for grain surreptitiously returned to their sacks, in some sense a loan only but, as it turned out, an act concealing a gift, which led to reconciliation. Topics in the Two Debtors parable covering debt, sin, and forgiveness rework these features of the Joseph story.

This chapter considers five practices, or constellations of practices, that emerge from imitating Jesus: (1) care for the poor and needy, including the contested practice of seeing Christ in the poor; (2) sacramental practices of the Lord’s Supper and baptism; (3) prayer, including lament; (4) forgiveness, reconciliation, and peacemaking; and (5) self-giving or kenōsis. Each practice flows in its own way from the twin imperatives to love God and the neighbor.