Review of "Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World"

Abstract

W hat is love? W hat forgiveness? What, if anything, is their relationship? Historically and conceptually, as we will briefl y sketch out, their origins and subsequent fates have been vastly divergent. And yet these terms and the realities—ideas, values, and aff ects, in short, the concepts and practices—they stand for have traveled parallel paths, just as they have often been associated, even to the point of confusion. Does love off er forgiveness? Does love require forgiveness in order to be what it is? Does one forgive out of love? Could one, precisely out of love, de- cide not to forgive? Can one forgive but not love? Is forgiveness a prac- tical and pragmatic, perhaps even political or juridical concept, where love apparently is not? Or does love extend to a more than simply inter- personal level, captured also by other beings and things, groups and col- lectivities, nations and states, nature and cosmos?