Between Truth and Trust

Book excerpt: Radical wrongdoing can have devastating effects for entire communities, beyond individual trauma. Across cultures, different coping strategies that help victims to get on with their lives range from individual therapy to collective rituals and ceremonies. This new book distances itself from the predominantly individual take on forgiveness, and concentrates on its collective and cultural dimensions in a broad historical, religious and cultural context. By developing forgiveness as a particular speech act based on a precarious mutual acceptance between victims and perpetrators, the book suggests a new approach to forgiveness. Framed by this challenging reciprocity, forgiveness becomes an ongoing experiment in mutual understanding, which, to be successful, requires the imagination of a shared future. Literature, as a creative and imaginary medium of expression, is integrated throughout the book as a vehicle to explore a deeper understanding of the cultural practice of forgiveness. The book draws on literary texts from different cultures and religions across the globe; from antiquity and early Christianity to the present. In looking at forgiveness through this lens, the book offers a broader and more comprehensive approach than most of the existing scholarly literature and debates on forgiveness.