Rethinking Forgiveness – with Agnes Callard, Elizabeth Bruenig, and Jennifer Banks

Join us for a panel on forgiveness with philosophy professor Agnes Callard and journalist Elizabeth Bruenig, hosted by Senior Executive Editor at Yale University Press Jennifer Banks, as we explore the practice of forgiveness in our unforgiving age.

In recent years, forgiveness has come under increasing attack. Isn’t it unfair, many have asked, to expect victims to forgive those who’ve wronged them? Doesn’t this expectation and the practice of redeeming offenders just reinforce existing hierarchies?

And yet forgiveness and its transformative power recur as themes in some of the most harrowing and morally complex stories of our time. So what exactly is forgiveness? How do we define it and how does it shape our individual life stories and the societies we live in?

In this salon, we will explore the philosophical and practical dimensions of forgiveness, drawing particularly on Elizabeth Bruenig’s ground-breaking reporting on death row prisoners, to reconsider the promises and perils of forgiveness in our world today.

Recommended Reading

Inside America’s Death Chambers (Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic)

The Paradox of Apology (Agnes Callard, The Point Magazine)

This event will be recorded.