Honest Patriots : Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its MisdeedsIn Honest Patriots, renowned public theologian and ethicist Donald W. Shriver, Jr. argues that we must acknowledge and repent of the morally negative events in our nation's past. The failure to do so skews the relations of many Americans to one another, breeds ongoing hostility, and damages the health of our society. Yet our civic identity today largely rests on denials, forgetfulness, and inattention to the memories of neighbors whose ancestors suffered great injustices at the hands of some dominant majority. Shriver contends that repentance for these injustices must find a place in our political culture. Such repentance must be carefully and deliberately cultivated through the accurate teaching of history, by means of public symbols that embody both positive and negative memory, and through public leadership to this end. Religious people and religious organizations have an important role to play in this process. Historically, the Christian tradition has concentrated on the personal dimensions of forgiveness and repentance to the near-total neglect of their collective aspects. Recently, however, the idea of collective moral responsibility has gained new and public visibility. Official apologies for past collective injustice have multiplied, along with calls for reparations. Shriver looks in detail at the examples of Germany and South Africa, and their pioneering efforts to foster and express collective repentance. He then turns to the historic wrongs perpetrated against African Americans and Native Americans and to recent efforts by American citizens and governmental bodies to seek public justice by remembering public injustice. The call for collective repentance presents many challenges: What can it mean to morally master a past whose victims are dead and whose sufferings cannot be alleviated? What are the measures that lend substance to language and action expressing repentance? What symbolic and tangible acts produce credible turns away from past wrongs? What are the dynamics-psychological, social, and political-whereby we can safely consign an evil to the past? How can public life witness to corporate crimes of the past in such a way that descendents of victims can be confident that they will never be repeated? In his provocative answers to these questions Shriver creates a compelling new vision of the collective repentance and apology that must precede real progress in relations between the races in this country. |
From inside the book
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Page 4
... camps in Nazi Germany and prisons in apartheid South Africa will testify in the first half of this book . In the latter half , I center on certain “ grave truths of the past ” which , from the standpoints of our moral , psycho- logical ...
... camps in Nazi Germany and prisons in apartheid South Africa will testify in the first half of this book . In the latter half , I center on certain “ grave truths of the past ” which , from the standpoints of our moral , psycho- logical ...
Page 15
... camps. If you had forgotten what he looked like, a big portrait is there to remind you, along with data on the trains, the bureaucrats, and the victims involved in his operation.4 Virtually all the buildings in this center of Berlin ...
... camps. If you had forgotten what he looked like, a big portrait is there to remind you, along with data on the trains, the bureaucrats, and the victims involved in his operation.4 Virtually all the buildings in this center of Berlin ...
Page 19
... camps until Allies opened the gates and let the photographers in. Then we had indelible ideas of the evil called Nazism. If any of us had any reservations about the importance of defeating that evil militarily, the camp pictures put ...
... camps until Allies opened the gates and let the photographers in. Then we had indelible ideas of the evil called Nazism. If any of us had any reservations about the importance of defeating that evil militarily, the camp pictures put ...
Page 22
... camp in 1945, visited it again, nor did they advise their children and visitors to do so.10 Such a psychology of avoidance in history teaching has parallels all over the world. Stalin did not plan to make one of the gulag camps into a ...
... camp in 1945, visited it again, nor did they advise their children and visitors to do so.10 Such a psychology of avoidance in history teaching has parallels all over the world. Stalin did not plan to make one of the gulag camps into a ...
Page 24
... camp photographs of the 1940s, tutored by the books of Elie Wiesel, and touched early by The Diary of Anne Frank had difficulty understanding the impact of this series on Germans. The scenes of the drama fell far short of many previous ...
... camp photographs of the 1940s, tutored by the books of Elie Wiesel, and touched early by The Diary of Anne Frank had difficulty understanding the impact of this series on Germans. The scenes of the drama fell far short of many previous ...
Contents
3 | |
15 | |
In the Wake of Remembered Evil | 63 |
To African Americans | 127 |
Photo gallery | 206 |
Native Americans | 207 |
Agenda for the American Future | 263 |
Notes | 287 |
Bibliography | 333 |
Index | 339 |
Other editions - View all
Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds Donald W. Shriver Limited preview - 2005 |
Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds Donald W. Shriver Jr. Limited preview - 2005 |
Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds Donald W. Shriver Jr. Limited preview - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
African Americans Afrikaner Alex Boraine American history apartheid Berlin Boraine camp Cape Town Cayugas celebration century church citizens civil rights claim Columbia County Commission contemporary culture death debate Desmond Tutu District Six English event evil F. W. De Klerk forget former future German groups high school history historians history books Holocaust hope human Ibid Indians injustice Jewish Jews justice Lakota land leaders lives Mandela memory million Mohicans monument moral murder museum Native Americans Nazi neighbors never Niebuhr official Oklahoma past political Powhatan prison question quoted racism recent Reconciliation remember reparations residents responsibility Richmond riot Robben Island Rosewood settlers side slavery slaves society South African southern Steglitz story suffering survivors teachers thousand tion Todd-Curti truth Tulsa Tulsa Race Riot United University victims Virginia visitors York young