November 19, 2004
WN: I cannot recall where this was published/presented. A similar article also on this website (“Restorative Justice Stories – MCCC 50th Anniversary, December 14, 2013”) was presented nine years later in Winnipeg exactly on the MCCC 50th anniversay weekend, and on the occasion of the launching of Esther Epp-Tiessen’s book, Mennonite Central Committee in Canada.
An excerpt:
Anthropologist René Girard notes: “In the Hebrew Bible, there is clearly a dynamic that moves in the direction of the rehabilitation of the victims, but it is not a cut-and-dried thing. Rather, it is a process under way, a text in travail; it is not a chronologically progressive process, but a struggle that advances and retreats. I see the Gospels as the climactic achievement of that trend, and therefore as the essential text in the cultural upheaval of the modern world (Violent Origins, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 1987, p. 141).”If Girard is right, part of that “cultural upheaval” is restorative (transformative) justice.
Please click on: Restorative Justice and Spiritual Origins
