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
... events fade in personal and public memory : “ Amnesia seeps into the crevices of our brains and am- nesia heals . ” Ingrained American optimism concurs : For us , “ the future is ever- young , ever forgetting the gravest truths of the ...
... events fade in personal and public memory : “ Amnesia seeps into the crevices of our brains and am- nesia heals . ” Ingrained American optimism concurs : For us , “ the future is ever- young , ever forgetting the gravest truths of the ...
Page 5
... events when we mourn some features of our national past with new present awareness that we must never repeat such events in our future . This is a book about citizens in three countries who have revisited pasts of which their moral and ...
... events when we mourn some features of our national past with new present awareness that we must never repeat such events in our future . This is a book about citizens in three countries who have revisited pasts of which their moral and ...
Page 13
... event of September 11, 2001, we may find anew reasons for both pride and repentance in the history of our country. The Germans and South Africans soon to be quoted are of like mind. No one has expressed it better than Dietrich ...
... event of September 11, 2001, we may find anew reasons for both pride and repentance in the history of our country. The Germans and South Africans soon to be quoted are of like mind. No one has expressed it better than Dietrich ...
Page 22
... events less than twenty-five years in the past, but this assumption hardly ex- plains why history books and history teachers in Germany of the 1950s avoided ... event and go on living as if it had never happened , but as 22 honest patriots.
... events less than twenty-five years in the past, but this assumption hardly ex- plains why history books and history teachers in Germany of the 1950s avoided ... event and go on living as if it had never happened , but as 22 honest patriots.
Page 28
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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