"Bless me Father, for I have sinned," says the penitent to open the dialogue in Catholic confessionals across the globe and throughout the ages. Along with the priest's words, "For your penance . . ." this encounter is an icon of Catholic life. But does the script, and the practices it signifies, have any relevance beyond the confessional? In The Politics of Penance, Michael Griffin responds yes. He explores great figures of the Christian tradition--the early Irish monks, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope St. John Paul II--to offer surprising insights for social repair. The result is a new ethic, which Griffin applies to contemporary crises in criminal justice, truth and reconciliation, and the treatment of soldiers returning from war.

The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation examines contemporary political violence and atrocity in the context of the crisis of the nation-state. It explores the way violence is used to unmake the social world and how its product: suffering, is used to try to remake the social world. Humphrey considers both the unmaking of the world through torture, war, urbicide and ethnic cleansing and the resultant remaking of the world through testimony and witnessing in the forums of truth commissions and trials. The discussion thus moves from terror to trauma.

Using hitherto unconsidered source materials from late antiquity to the early modern period, this volume charts new views about the role of penance in shaping western attitudes and practices for resolving social, political, and spiritual tensions, as penitents and confessors negotiated rituals and expectations for penitential expression.

This work argues that casuistry provided an important resource for Donne and others caught in the welter of conflicting laws and religions in post-Reformation Europe. Focussing on Donne's works, the book also examines the political, historical, and theological discourses in which Donne's view of authority and interpretation took shape.

This book examines the recent phenomenon in Latin America of national Truth and Reconciliation commissions. Few studies have examined the role of Churches or religion in political processes that proclaim valued theological terms as their agenda - truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This book questions the role of religion, specifically of established Churches. The impact of such reconciliation commissions on Indigenous Native Americans is also examined, as is the role of women and how both commissions and Churches or religions were challenged by their experiences. The contributors offer differing perspectives on one or more national truth and reconciliation processes and thus offer a collection that serves as valuable source for the disciplines of Religious Studies, Ethics, Theology, Political Science, Social Sciences and Women's Studies.

Penitential practice in the Holy Roman Empire 900-1050, examined through records in church law, the liturgy, monastic and other sources. This study examines all forms of penitential practice in the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonian and Salian Reich, c.900 - c.1050. This crucial period in the history of penance, falling between the Carolingians' codification of public and private penance, and the promotion of the practice of confession in the thirteenth century, has largely been ignored by historians. Tracing the varieties of penitential practice recorded in church law, the liturgy, monastic practice, narrative and documentary sources, Dr Hamilton's book argues that many of the changes previously attributed to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be found earlier in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Whilst acknowledging that there was a degree of continuity from the Carolingian period, she asserts that the period should be seen as having its own dynamic. Investigating the sources for penitential practice by genre, sheacknowledges the prescriptive bias of many of them and points ways around the problem in order to establish the reality of practice in this area at this time. This book thus studies the Church in action in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the reality of relations between churchmen, and between churchmen and the laity, as well as the nature of clerical aspirations. It examines the legacy left by the Carolingian reformers and contributes to our understanding of pre-Gregorian mentalities in the period before the late eleventh-century reforms. SARAH HAMILTON teaches in the Department of History, University of Exeter.

This compelling book, first published in 1995, changed historians' understanding of the history of public penance, a topic crucial to debates about the complex evolution of individualism in the West. Mary C. Mansfield demonstrates that various forms of public humiliation, imposed on nobles and peasants alike for shocking crimes as well as for minor brawls, survived into the thirteenth century and beyond.