The archetypal story of Thomas Kendall, a self-torturing, struggling missionary in nineteenth century New Zealand, is also a remarkable history of cross-cultural experience. Posted to New Zealand in 1814, Kendall was immensely devout but entirely unprepared for dealing with Māori. He nonetheless helped produce the first Māori Grammar, but was hindered by rumours of an affair with a Māori chief’s daughter. Dismissed from his duties in 1823, he continued studying Māori culture until his death nearly a decade later. Long out of print, this work by a leading New Zealand historian tells an absorbing story of the difficulties and dangers of the evangelical mission.
With the first unified theory of guilt, shame, and anxiety, this pioneering psychiatrist and critic of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs examines the causes and effects of psychological and emotional suffering from the perspective of biological evolution, child development, and mature adult decision-making. Drawing on evolution, neuroscience, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Breggin analyzes what he calls our negative legacy emotions-the painful emotional heritage that encumbers all human beings. The author marshals evidence that we evolved as the most violent and yet most empathic creatures on Earth. Evolution dealt with this species-threatening conflict between our violence and our close-knit social life by building guilt, shame, and anxiety into our genes. These inhibiting emotions were needed prehistorically to control our self-assertiveness and aggression within intimate family and clan relationships. Dr. Breggin shows how guilt, shame, and anxiety eventually became self-defeating and demoralizing legacies from our primitive past, which no longer play any useful or positive role in mature adult life. He then guides the reader through the Three Steps to Emotional Freedom, starting with how to identify negative legacy emotions and then how to reject their control over us. Finally, he describes how to triumph over and transcend guilt, shame, and anxiety on the way to greater emotional freedom and a more rational, loving, and productive life.
In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II—a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous war crimes. As he travels through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, he encounters people who are remarkably honest in confronting the past and others who astonish by their evasions of responsibility, some who wish to forget the past and others who wish to use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism. Buruma explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries’ very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art have been shaped by its shadow. Today, seventy years after the end of the war, he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago. Sensitive yet unsparing, complex and unsettling, this is a profound study of how people face up to or deny terrible legacies of guilt and shame.
The Jamieson Family Legacy series follows the lives of the two Jamieson brothers in Boston, Kidd and Ace and their cousin Cameron from St. Louis. Kidd, the older brother, is struggling with anger and resentment issues toward his absentee father who never married his mother, but had the audacity to demand his illegitimate sons carry his last name Jamieson. Ace, on the other hand, is on a collision course with disaster as he shows how much a “chip off the old block” he is when it comes to women. Their highly educated MIT graduate cousin, Cameron Jamieson, is all about saving his family from self-destruction. Through genealogy research, Cameron’s mission is to show his cousins their worth as eleventh generation descendants of a royal African tribe and give them a choice: to be angry black men or accept the challenge to become strong successful black men. In Free From Guilt the third book in the Jamieson Legacy, Cameron, cousin to Kidd and Ace, has it all: the looks, money and tbrains. An MIT double degree graduate and lecturer, he is a genius. No amount of knowledge or wisdom however can convince him of the simplicity of God’s love and the gift of salvation. He believes it’s much more complicated than those men preaching from an outdated book lead others to believe. It’s simply going to take more to make a believer out of him. And, he’s not alone in this thinking. Beatrice “Tilley” Beacon, aka Grandma BB is a seventy-something, childless widow who is young at heart and full of life. Her antics are legendary among her surrogate family, the Jamiesons, her five hundred facebook fans and the local law enforcement, to whom she is known as the neighborhood one-woman militia crime task force. The Jamieson’s always thought they were a unified front to draw Grandma BB to Christ. But when Cameron, her surrogate grandson and the youngest of their clan, returns to spend time with the family in St. Louis, he immediately takes Grandma BB’s position that life is to be enjoyed to the fullest. There’s always time to repent …later.
Hating you was supposed to make me forget these thoughts… Valentina is visited by Gio Corretti, the heir of a famous Sicilian family. He is the only one who can save her from the trouble she’s in. However, Gio is also the last person she should rely on, since he was involved in her brother’s tragic accident seven years ago. Back then, Valentina was torn between her grief over the loss of her brother and her complicated love for Gio. But meeting him again now, her hidden feelings are overflowing…
The 'Lincoln Lawyer' grapples with a haunting case in a gripping thriller from bestselling author Michael Connelly. Mickey Haller gets the text 'Call me ASAP - 187', and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Suddenly, Mickey's not just trying to get his client off a murder charge, but there is a more personal connection: the victim was Gloria Dayton - his own former client, a prostitute he thought he had rescued and put on the straight and narrow. Far from saving her, Haller may have been her downfall. Haunted by the ghosts of his own past, and with his own guilt or redemption on the line, he desperately needs to find out who Gloria really was and who, ultimately, was responsible for her death.
This book describes how the states in post-1945 Austria, Germany, and Japan have tried to deal with the legacy of the Second World War and how their policies have affected their relations with other countries in the region. It focuses on the intersection of national interest and popular emotions and argues that it is possible to reconcile over historical issues, but that to do so can exact a considerable political cost.
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends Paul Gottfried’s examination of Western managerial government’s growth in the last third of the twentieth century. Linking multiculturalism to a distinctive political and religious context, the book argues that welfare-state democracy, unlike bourgeois liberalism, has rejected the once conventional distinction between government and civil society. Gottfried argues that the West’s relentless celebrations of diversity have resulted in the downgrading of the once dominant Western culture. The moral rationale of government has become the consciousness-raising of a presumed majority population. While welfare states continue to provide entitlements and fulfill the other material programs of older welfare regimes, they have ceased to make qualitative leaps in the direction of social democracy. For the new political elite, nationalization and income redistributions have become less significant than controlling the speech and thought of democratic citizens. An escalating hostility toward the bourgeois Christian past, explicit or at least implicit in the policies undertaken by the West and urged by the media, is characteristic of what Gottfried labels an emerging “therapeutic” state. For Gottfried, acceptance of an intrusive political correctness has transformed the religious consciousness of Western, particularly Protestant, society. The casting of “true” Christianity as a religion of sensitivity only toward victims has created a precondition for extensive social engineering. Gottfried examines late-twentieth-century liberal Christianity as the promoter of the politics of guilt. Metaphysical guilt has been transformed into self-abasement in relation to the “suffering just” identified with racial, cultural, and lifestyle minorities. Unlike earlier proponents of religious liberalism, the therapeutic statists oppose anything, including empirical knowledge, that impedes the expression of social and cultural guilt in an effort to raise the self-esteem of designated victims. Equally troubling to Gottfried is the growth of an American empire that is influencing European values and fashions. Europeans have begun, he says, to embrace the multicultural movement that originated with American liberal Protestantism’s emphasis on diversity as essential for democracy. He sees Europeans bringing authoritarian zeal to enforcing ideas and behavior imported from the United States. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends the arguments of the author’s earlier After Liberalism. Whether one challenges or supports Gottfried’s conclusions, all will profit from a careful reading of this latest diagnosis of the American condition.
From the author of the international bestselling novel The Reader comes a compelling collection of six essays exploring the long shadow of past guilt, not just a German experience, but a global one as well.?I know of no other writer who engages with the struggle between the individual and the political world as deftly - and poetically - as Bernhard Schlink.' - The Herald Bernhard Schlink explores the phenomenon of guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. He considers how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behaviour, how to.
The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. Katharina von Kellenbach draws on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after World War II. These documents provide intimate insights into the self-reflection and self-perception of perpetrators. As Germany looks back on more than sixty years of passionate debate about political, personal and legal guilt, its ongoing engagement with the legacy of perpetration has transformed German culture and politics. The willingness to forgive and forget displayed by the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son became the paradigm central to Germany's rehabilitation and reintegration of Nazi perpetrators. The problem with Luke's parable in this context is that, unlike the son in the parable, perpetrators did not ask for forgiveness. Most agents of state crimes felt innocent. Von Kellenbach proposes the story of the mark of Cain as a counter narrative. In contrast to the Prodigal Son, who is quickly forgiven and welcomed back into the house of the father, the fratricidal Cain is charged to rebuild his life on the basis of open communication about the past. The story of the Prodigal Son equates forgiveness with forgetting; Cain's story links redemption with remembrance and suggests a strategy of critical engagement with perpetrators.
