The
Meaning and Significance of Forgiveness in Political, Social, and Theological
Contexts
Institutional requests for
forgiveness are increasingly making the news. Some respond to falling political
structures-the end of apartheid in South Africa, of communism in the former
Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and of dictatorships in Latin America
and Asia. Others display a new willingness to engage in self-evaluation:
the Catholic Church has asked forgiveness for "sins against the people
of Israel" and "against the fundamental rights of persons"; some western
leaders have apologized for their states' role in political subversion
and economic subjugation of Third World peoples. Such requests for
forgiveness provide hope for reconciliation and renewal, but they also
raise important questions. What does it mean to forgive? What are the conditions
under which forgiveness is possible? Is it always appropriate? How does
the act of forgiveness actually change anything?
During its inaugural semester
in the fall of 2001, the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the
College of the Holy Cross will sponsor an interdisciplinary conference-a
college-wide open teaching event-on the meaning, practice, and implications
of forgiveness. The Conference, to be held Friday evening, Sept. 14, and
Saturday, Sept. 15, will be the centerpiece of a semester-long series of
events that explore the theme of forgiveness in a variety of cultural,
political, social, economic, and religious contexts. During the conference,
and the semester that follows it, we aim to engage as many members of the
Holy Cross community as possible in exploring forgiveness.
The Conference will examine
core philosophical questions about the meaning and sources of forgiveness,
its costs, and what forgiveness accomplishes. Through panels, presentations,
exhibits and performances, we will ask questions about the quality of forgiveness
and the degree to which people in the United States and other nations are
sensitive to the power of and need for forgiveness. Faculty and outside
speakers will examine the role of forgiveness in particular post-conflict
societies. Others will examine forgiveness as a ritual form, explore its
role in family dynamics, probe whether forgiving involves forgetting, analyze
the issues surrounding third world debt forgiveness, raise issues about
forgiveness and the American criminal justice system, and address what
role forgiveness plays in the U.S.
The final component of the
conference, more explicitly theological, raises questions about the nexus
between forgiveness as a human enterprise, and the biblical conception
of a God. When we insist that, in the interests of justice, wrongdoers
must be punished, do we act as God? Conversely, when we clear the guilty
in the name of forgiveness, have we acted as God? What is the power of
forgiveness, how does it change the world in which we live, and how, in
the end, does it promote our creation of the kind of world God intended?
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