Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Two parables that have become firmly lodged in popular consciousness and affection are the parable of the Good Samaritan and the parable of the Prodigal Son. These simple but subversive tales have historically had a significant impact on shaping the spiritual, aesthetic, moral, and legal traditions of Western civilization, and their capacity to inform debate on a wide range of moral and social issues remains as potent as ever. Noting that both stories deal with episodes of serious interpersonal offending, and both recount restorative responses on the part of the leading characters, Compassionate Justice draws on the insights of restorative justice theory, legal philosophy, and social psychology to offer a fresh reading of these two great parables. It also provides a compelling analysis of how the priorities commended by the parables are pertinent to the criminal justice system today. The parables teach that the conscientious cultivation of compassion is essential to achieving true justice. Restorative justice strategies, this book argues, provide a promising and practical means of attaining this goal of reconciling justice with compassion.
Top Highlights
“The four central panes of the window are devoted to scenes from” (Page 27)
“Moreover, in his devotion to this task, the Samaritan is not singled out as an exceptionally meritorious individual worthy only of gaping admiration. He is offered as a concrete example to be emulated by hearers (v. 37), as one who demonstrates what it means to perform the law’s true meaning (v. 36) and thereby to secure the law’s ultimate gift of eternal life (v. 28).” (Page 39)
“The reason for seeking such a ruling was not so much to clarify whom he was obligated to love (he already knew that), but whom beyond his preferred in-group he was free not to love. Behind his perfectly respectable legal inquiry, in other words, lay the deeper concern of ensuring that the law functioned to sustain group boundaries by confirming the absence of positive duties to any beyond the borderlines.” (Page 45)
“The parable reaches its climax, then, in a dispute about whether the father, in restoring his offending son to community without imposing retributive punishment, has acted justly or unjustly.” (Page 193)
“What is fundamentally at stake from beginning to end is the value, or lack of value, that attaches to the person of the victim.” (Page 36)