Not without reason, then, Daniel Philpott starts from the assumption that war leaves behind wounds of injustice. These are not just physical bodily wounds—though they are paramount—but are wounds in the form of violations of human rights, wounds of ignorance about the source and circumstance of injustice, wounds derived from lack of acknowledgement, and what Philpott describes as “the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice.” Taking a somewhat Kantian line, Philpott notes that wrongdoers are also themselves wounded by their acts, a view that also finds strong resonance in the religious traditions that he examines.. Their wrongdoing creates a moral sickness that inhibits fulfilment and happiness. As Philpott reminds us, the technology of the gas chamber was first developed as a way of saving German firing squads from the trauma caused by their deeds.

When all the wounds of war and oppression are taken into account, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many peace processes—as many as half by some calculations—are doomed to fail. Sometimes, the victory of the wrongdoer is allowed to stand. Those, who like I, have visited post-war Srebrenica understand the palpable sense of injustice felt by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the more than 7,600 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were massacred when that town was “ethnically cleansed.” Today, Srebrenica is an almost 100% Serbian town. The victory of injustice was allowed to stand. Other times, victims of rights abuse may resent the absence of acknowledgement or reparation; perpetrators may be reluctant to acknowledge their wrongs or relinquish their gains. Whatever the precise nature of the tension, the social bonds and contracts that knit societies together will have been destroyed; trust broken; resentment amassed. No matter how much effort and how many resources are dedicated to the rebuilding of institutions, infrastructure and homes, peace is unlikely to be durable unless it rests on the firm foundation of genuine reconciliation. This is why Just and Unjust Peace is such a welcome, and important, read. It makes both a well-reasoned argument in favor of a politics of reconciliation in the face of war and oppression and sets out six principal methods for achieving that goal: building socially just institutions, acknowledgement of past wrongs by the perpetrators, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness.

At its heart, this book is a passionate and compelling defense of political reconciliation written in the spirit of some of the great peacemakers of our time. Desmond Tutu and some of the controversies he has aroused is a frequent point of reference, but the tenor of the book also reminds us of the logic behind Ramos Horta’s decision to privilege the normalizing of relations with Jakarta above retribution and punishment after the bloodshed in East Timor. The central points—and the tools for restoring societies to balance—will be familiar to students of peace studies. Mark Amstutz’s work on political forgiveness springs to mind. But what this book adds—brilliantly to my mind—is a deep and well-argued account of why communities, states and international organizations should pursue this path, and an account firmly rooted in political philosophy and religious tradition.

Naturally, there are points that could be quibbled with in terms of the logic of some of Philpott’s argument. As other reviewers have pointed out, reconciliation is not necessarily a prerequisite to peace—if we understand that term to mean “the absence of war.” There are plenty of cases where peace has prevailed without reconciliation. North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, and Bosnia are conflicts where there has been little evidence of reconciliation of the sort espoused by Philpott but also no resumption of armed conflict—yet. However, I am less worried than others about this possibility because whilst what Johan Galtung described as “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of war) may prevail without reconciliation, “positive peace” (i.e. the absence of fear, the fulfilment of human rights) almost never will. Without reconciliation and the forging of positive peace, communities will always be wary, always insecure, always unsatisfied and—for the utilitarians among us—will always misdirect precious resources and energies away from productive and fulfilling activities and towards their own protection from future threats. As scholars in International Relations know only too well, this can in turn create “security dilemmas” in which one group’s preparations for self-defense appear aggressive to another, sparking that group to step up its own preparations. Herein lies one of the ways in which negative peace can degenerate back into violent conflict. What is more, peace without reconciliation is much easier when the unreconciled parties have an international boundary or ocean between them. Where the lines of dispute are communal and fuzzy, as they often are in the aftermath of civil war (by far the most common kind of war today), the day-to-day necessities of engagement make reconciliation all the more pressing.

Another source of criticism has been that Philpott grounds his ethic of reconciliation in three major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—and a secular ethic he describes as the “liberal peace.” The cornerstones of the politics of reconciliation he sets out are derived from what Philpott claims to be an “overlapping consensus” across these traditions. Of course, though, this remains a decidedly partial account of justice principles, none of which originate from Africa for example. This problem worries me less than it worries others primarily because most of the ethical traditions I’m familiar with embrace most of the values that Philpott includes within his account of reconciliation and because Philpott himself acknowledges two key caveats to his argument—that reconciliation will never be complete or perfect and that the precise form that it takes should differ according to the context. Philpott is right, in my view, to recognize that religious traditions have ethical content that can be useful to reconciliation. We need to recognize, however, that the application of religious arguments and concepts may be more helpful in some circumstances than in others, and that Philpott’s own reading of the essential aspects of those traditions is itself partial and downplays elements that are antithetical to reconciliation. As Norwegian diplomats engaged in the Oslo peace process in the Middle East would attest, contested claims to ownership over sacred sites rooted in a theological epistemology that knows no compromise are one of the few utterly impenetrable obstacles to reconciliation.

Yet these strike me as issues that present themselves in particular contexts. Of course—as Philpott acknowledges—the politics of reconciliation must make sense in the time and place in which it occurs; it must be rooted in the locale. Tutu’s use of religion during his time as chair as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was right in that time and place. It was right, precisely because it was Tutu. It may not be right in other settings. Whatever the configuration, however, it is clear that the politics of reconciliation should be front and center of any attempt at building peace in the aftermath of war and grave injustice.

Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.

Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.

More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.

In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.

Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.

One of Philpott’s goals in Just and Unjust Peace is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” (3). This is the question that has been at the center of ongoing debates on transitional and international justice, but Philpott goes about addressing it in a wholly original way. Instead of grounding the inquiry in a preliminary engagement with prevailing international legal standards, he begins by articulating a general theoretical approach to justice and reconciliation, and then uses it to examine contemporary institutions and practices.

The result is an impressive and rewarding discussion that addresses debates on transitional justice, as well as debates on the role of religion in international politics. Philpott’s theory of justice emerges as a grand synthesis of traditions and goals that are routinely taken to be in conflict with one another. He rejects the opposition of forward-looking and backward-looking approaches to justice, calling for practices that are “Janus-faced, peering in both directions” (6). He dismisses the persistent view that the pursuit of justice is in tension with the goal of political reconciliation, insisting that justice must encompass reconciliation and that any ethically grounded conception of political reconciliation must also entail a commitment to justice. At the same time, Philpott proposes a theoretical approach that aims to bridge the gulf between religious and secular responses to injustice.

Philpott addresses claims asserting the incompatibility of religion and rights by suggesting that such claims tend to be premised on the view that religious believers invariably identify their ethics with a kind of argument by fiat, such as, “policy X is ordained by the Lord and that is that!” (111). This kind of logic, insists Philpott, is typical of bad religious arguments, but not religious arguments per se, adding that “we do well to remember that there are secular forms of these arguments too” (111). He reminds readers that the international humanitarian legal tradition emerged out of Christian theological writings on just war theory and that religious activists have played an important role in various struggles to expand civil and human rights.

At the same time Philpott takes on the claim, prominent in liberal political thought, that political argumentation must be expressed in a secular “public” language. To exclude religious rationales from the process of public justification, he argues, implies that people should offer rationales other than the ones that actually motivate them in efforts to defend their political views. As an alternative, Philpott proposes an approach to integrating religious and secular ethics that is grounded in what he calls “rooted reason”—one that invites those motivated by religion to present their full rationales, but also insists that they remain open to alternative views and be capable of re-expressing their ethics in a secular language. The goal he envisions is a “mutual resonance, involving a reciprocal back-and-forth process of comparison and efforts at mutual understanding” (21).

From this starting point, Philpott seeks to ground his approach to justice in an “overlapping consensus” between the liberal tradition and ideas drawn from ancient texts in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. In a series of chapters dedicated to examining ideas from each tradition, Philpott relies primarily on ancient texts for guidance, with less attention to the way that living traditions and contemporary religious practices might inform responses to the specific problem of political injustice. The theoretical framework that emerges seems to be organized around a discussion of reconciliation that is drawn largely from the Christian tradition, while works from the other traditions are mined for potentially compatible ideas. It seems to me that the kind of mutual understanding Philpott calls for in his preliminary chapters would benefit from greater attention to what might be learned from unique and conflicting approaches to framing the problems that he sets out to address. Nevertheless, these chapters make for interesting and evocative reading.

Just and Unjust Peace advocates a restorative approach to justice that addresses the “wounds of political injustice,” conceived broadly as encompassing violations of human rights, harms to persons, lack of knowledge about political injustices, and the absence of acknowledgment from officials. In keeping with restorative justice principles, Philpott’s approach encompasses harms or damage experienced by the wrongdoer as well. To this list, Philpott adds the wounds inflicted by the “standing victory” of the wrongdoer’s injustice. Philpott argues, given that political injustices are associated with a particular political order or program, the failure to effectively oppose or defeat that political order will continue to be experienced as a wound by its victims.

Philpott grounds his theory of justice in ethics and principles, but articulates it as an array of practices aimed at ameliorating these various wounds. Such practices, he argues, ideally ought to include efforts to build socially just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment, and forgiveness. Philpott’s discussion of these practices offers an interesting counterpoint to scholarship that has sought to measure the impact of individual transitional justice through statistical analysis of cross-national data. “The practices complement one another, complete one another, and weave together,” he argues (174). The implied critique of a certain emphasis on isolating and measuring the impact of individual transitional justice mechanisms reminded me of Michael Pollan’s response to nutrition science. The problem with the kind of approach, Philpott suggests, is that it can blind us to the complicated and dynamic ways that various strategies work together synergistically.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is on the theme of punishment, which makes an important theoretical intervention in ongoing debates on restorative justice and legalism. These debates have tended to position restorative justice in opposition, not only to prosecution, but also to retributive rationales for punishment. Philpott rejects this opposition. He offers a compelling case that retribution is a dimension of restorative justice and one of its most important moral responses to political injustice. At the same time, he takes on those who have attempted to analyze the role of war crimes trials only in relation to their impact on goals such as improvement in human rights practices, stability, democratic change, or deterrence. The fundamental problem with this essentially consequentialist approach, Philpott observes simply, is that it “does not deal with the past” (91). Indeed, it is a strange thing to consider that the literature on transitional justice, an arena of study and practice that emerged in connection with the goal of “dealing with the past,” has increasingly identified “success” with achievements that have very little to do with the quality of their response to past wrongs. Philpott counters this trend by making the case for the integrity of retribution as a moral response to political injustice, while also rejecting the “inordinate focus on incarceration,” characteristic of Western criminal justice systems (65). He does so by situating the role of punishment in the larger context of efforts to pursue reintegration and repair.

Philpott’s theoretical approach is so holistic that one gets the feeling that many of the questions or potential criticisms that one might raise for him would likely be acknowledged and then swallowed up into his grand theoretical framework. This quality enriches the book, but is also one of its vulnerabilities. There is integrity in the way that Philpott engages his theoretical interlocutors. In presenting his own arguments, he takes care to identify and acknowledge what is most compelling in the strongest opposing view. In making the case for forgiveness as a practice of justice, for example, he begins with the voice of Francine, a victim of the Rwandan genocide, whose narrative immediately reveals how absurd—even obscene—appeals for forgiveness can appear to those who have survived atrocities. Such passages model the kind of “ethic of engagement” that he takes to be integral to the goal of establishing dialogue across lines of conflict and belief.

In addressing various critics, however, Philpott never seems to name or fully confront what is perhaps the most significant challenge animating various debates on the theme of addressing political injustice: the threat of backlash. Political injustices are defined here as violations or deviations from international norms, but they are also, importantly, crimes of obedience. Despite all of the various forms that they take, political injustices share certain features as a result. These are abuses that have been rationalized, normalized, or legalized by officials under a prior order, and actively or tacitly supported by a significant portion of a population. Efforts to acknowledge such wrongs as wrongs, let alone punish those who committed them, are invariably met with backlash and denial to varying degrees.

Most, if not all, of the positions that Philpott engages here, most theoretical debates on transitional justice, have taken shape in response to this particular challenge. The potential threat of backlash and denial is the main reason that scholars have perceived the goals of peace, or reconciliation, and justice to be in tension with one another. The “peace versus justice” debate, in all of its many forms, is premised on the view that peace requires some form of preliminary effort to address the potentially volatile forces of denial. The persistence of efforts to deny or rationalize past wrongs is one reason that so much attention is given to truth commissions as a mechanism for addressing political injustice. It is also the reason that many scholars and policymakers have suggested that forward-looking responses to the past may be in tension with backward-looking responses. Calls for retribution, acknowledgement, and apologies in response to past wrongs are blamed for stirring up conflict and destabilizing the peace precisely because they aspire to challenge persistent forms of denial.

Philpott’s assertion that these debates are positioned around false dichotomies depends on his having set such problems aside. As it is elaborated, the model seems to envision a world in which those who supported the political injustices in question have already come to appreciate that they were in the wrong. In such a world, the message of censure associated with punishment or acknowledgement should not be rejected as illegitimate “victor’s justice” as long as these responses are conducted in accordance with established norms and certain procedural guidelines. Although Philpott recognizes that any remedy for political injustice must begin with efforts to establish just institutions, the theory says little about the fact that it is due to the persistent threat of backlash that such efforts have often been associated with compromises on backward-looking responses to political injustice. The model also sidesteps the question of how transitional justice practices may be manipulated, limited, and utilized strategically by those in power, or how they have been in many of the exemplary cases that he discusses.

How, then, should the forces of denial and backlash be addressed in efforts to remedy political injustice? If Just and Unjust Peace avoids a direct response to this question, it offers three indirect responses. First, the broader logic of the argument presented in Just and Unjust Peace seems to suggest that the most promising way to resolve such conflicts, as well as conflicts regarding the role of religion in politics, is to begin by focusing on points of possible convergence rather than difference, and that from this starting point, a foundation for common understanding might be established and deepened over time. There is wisdom in this suggestion, but it raises a difficult question. When does such an approach provide a foundation for bridging differences and when does it function instead to avoid conflict or mask compromise? Second, Philpott sometimes seems to suggest that, working together synergistically, the various practices of justice that he enumerates will function to effectively neutralize those who continue to deny or rationalize past wrongs. For example, punishment conducted in the restorative mode advocated here, situated in the context of broader measures aimed at advancing reconciliation and repair, might be less likely to trigger hostile backlash than punishment conducted with the goal of stigmatizing or excluding. This is a useful suggestion, but I think it minimizes the intensity of backlash that often accompanies even minor forms of acknowledgment. Ultimately, if they are to function as he suggests they should, Philpott’s practices of justice must be accompanied by significant political struggle and transformation.

The third way that Just and Unjust Peace addresses the problem of backlash is the most interesting to me. In a larger sense, the book may be read as insisting upon the value of articulating an ethic of justice and reconciliation that is held at a remove from calculations regarding backlash, power dynamics, or ongoing rationalizations of abuse and violence. Like Socrates in his response to Thrasymachus, the book insists on the importance of disentangling our discussions of what justice might mean from the manner in which it has been institutionalized, and hold such discussions at something of a remove from our assessments of what is possible or practical at a given time. For all of its attention to empirical studies and professed pragmatism, Just and Unjust Peace is, in that sense, a visionary exercise. It outlines an ethic that is “not so much a solution to evil as it is a response…that in the political realm will always be partially achieved” (5).

At first glance, this answer seems odd. Intense debates among scholars and within communities transitioning from conflict or repression to democracy often pit justice against reconciliation. Some within these debates argue that criminal trials may achieve justice but threaten reconciliation. Others argue that communities may choose to pursue reconciliation rather than justice as a second-best strategy justified in light of pragmatic and moral constraints.  For many the pursuit of justice and reconciliation are complementary but not identical; they argue that the justice of punishment may be pursued alongside efforts at truth-telling which promote reconciliation. All of these positions take reconciliation and justice to be distinct; what is at issue is the relationship between these two values and the implications of that relationship for the moral justifiability of various kinds of responses to injustice, such as criminal trials, truth commissions, reparations, and memorials.

Philpott departs from these views by essentially collapsing the distinction between these two ideas: justice is reconciliation. Philpott’s analysis is powerful. It is the product of meticulous research on philosophical theories and religious understandings of central moral concepts that structure political life. Philpott also considers and responds to almost every major objection that could be raised at each stage of his argument. As a result, a view that initially seems odd becomes plausible, indeed compelling. Anyone interested in the question of how communities should deal with past wrongs must take Philpott’s account of justice as political reconciliation into consideration. It is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of justice in the aftermath of wrongdoing and the nature of political reconciliation. And yet I am hesitant to endorse Philpott’s conclusions. Below I first describe Philpott’s account of justice as reconciliation and then discuss two reasons for my hesitation.

Political reconciliation, Philpott begins, refers to the process of restoring right relationships. This process is political when it focuses on individuals relating to one another in their role as citizens. Restoration is needed in political relationships, according to Philpott, when systematic violations of human rights occur; such violations constitute injustices and breaches of the standards of right relationships. The human rights that are mutually respected in right relationships are codified in international law, and reflected in the laws and constitutions of states as well as the actions of those who act in the state’s name. Violations wound individuals and relationships. Primary wounds include the violation itself, which constitutes a form of disrespect; harm to persons; ignorance of the cause of the injustice; failure to acknowledge the suffering injustices bring; the standing victory of the wrongdoer whose action constitutes a denial of the rights claim of the victim; and harm to the wrongdoer. Secondary wounds, Philpott argues, arise from primary wounds. Such wounds often cause memories of violence and suffering and loss, which lead to negative emotions such as humiliation and hatred. Such emotions can prompt judgments among victims about the appropriate vengeful actions to take, and actions that are based on these judgments, such as massacre and aggression. Thus, the cycle of violence persists.

In Philpott’s view, processes of restoration rectify these wounds. Primary restorations directly repair individuals and relationships and are, in virtue of this, intrinsically just. Secondary restorations, transformations in emotions and judgments which lead to altered action, include trust and a sense of the legitimacy of a new regime. Though not the primary aim of processes of reconciliation, these secondary restorations can be a consequence of them. Philpott considers six restorative practices: building just institutions and relations between states; acknowledgement (e.g., by truth commissions or through memorials); reparations; punishment; forgiveness; and apology.

Why think of this account of reconciliation as an account of justice? Philpott suggests that one important reason for making this move stems from the substantive argument given for viewing reconciliation in this way. A second important reason is that his view articulates a conception of justice already present in secular and religious traditions. Thus, this view can be the subject of an overlapping consensus among those who hold fundamentally different comprehensive conceptions of the good. To demonstrate this claim, Philpott considers Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the restorative justice movement, showing how the way that justice is conceptualized in these traditions resonates with the conception of justice articulated above. In each case, justice is conceptualized in terms of right conduct given a certain relationship and right responses to wrong conduct, where right responses are such that they restore the relationship that wrongdoing upset.

There is reason to be skeptical about the degree to which the conception of justice as reconciliation that Philpott advances really can become the subject of an overlapping consensus. I want to note in passing that it is far from obvious that this conception can be rooted in non-Abrahamic faith traditions (e.g., Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism). However, I want here to focus on secularists and whether we should think that they will be part of the overlapping consensus too. Philpott’s conception of justice in the aftermath of wrongdoing differs in important ways from the common conceptions of justice among, for example, Western liberal humanists. Philpott himself notes how strange the idea of reconciliation as justice will seem to many liberals “for whom justice means individual rights, a just distribution of wealth, just punishment, and other matters of desert, entitlement, and rights” (4). The justice of reconciliation is not primarily the justice of desert (as in retributive justice or what Philpott calls balance retributivism) or justice as fairness (as in Rawls’s theory of distributive justice). The justice of political reconciliation prioritizes the repairing of relationships and evaluates the justice of an action on the basis of what will achieve the repair that injustice creates; it is not fundamentally about responding to individuals and their actions in a manner that is in some sense fitting or due. Indeed, rather than resonating with the justice of retributivism and distributive justice articulated and defended by secularists and prevalent within liberal democratic communities, part of Philpott’s task is to problematize and challenge these notions. Of course all traditions, including secular liberal traditions, have their critics. Restorative justice is a secular movement, and it is to this understanding of justice that Philpott appeals when demonstrating that justice as reconciliation can become the subject of an overlapping consensus that includes secularists. However, restorative justice remains a somewhat minority view, and thus only a minority of secularists are likely to be included in the consensus Philpott envisions.

Demonstrating that the conception of justice as reconciliation can become the subject of an overlapping consensus is only the second of the justificatory tasks. It is also important, Philpott writes, to provide substantive reasons for thinking that his view is correct. I urge caution on this front as well. My main concern is that this framework has limited resources for identifying and articulating the hard choices and moral dilemmas that communities face in grappling with past injustice in the midst of rebuilding just institutions. It is important to recognize just how comprehensive the justice of reconciliation is. It includes mercy (“the cardinal virtue of reconciliation is mercy,” 62), it includes peace (“peace is the state that corresponds to being reconciled,” 63), and it includes the reconstruction of just institutions (this is one of the six practices that repair relations). All morally important aims and goals for communities grappling with past wrongdoing in the midst of transitioning to peace and democracy seem to be incorporated into this theoretical framework.

In a sense, then, almost anything a community does could qualify as just. Efforts to rebuild socially just institutions, the prosecution and punishment of wrongdoers, the offering of apology and the fostering of forgiveness: each constitutes a kind of reparative process aimed at rectifying some of the primary wounds injustice leaves behind. Given this, in a sense there are no hard choices; only choices about which dimension of justice will be a priority. Moreover, the dilemmas that practitioners responding to and theorists thinking about wrongdoing in the midst of a transition discuss seem to be illusory. That is, there does not seem to be conceptual space for allowing that the pursuit of one goal (such as punishment) may put other goals in jeopardy (such as restoring the rule of law); on Philpott’s view each attends to different needs of the same goal, that is, justice. The neatness of the theory makes me uneasy about the relevance and accuracy of its guidance for practitioners and members of transitional communities, in that instead of accounting for and providing guidance about their dilemmas, it may tend to make those dilemmas disappear.

The meaning of political reconciliation for Philpott centers on what he calls the “restoration of right relationship.” When a society emerges out of war or dictatorship, it is full of wounded relationships: among citizens, among communities, and between the state and its citizens and communities. These wounds are created by political injustices, the particular sort of injustices that transitional justice, at its best, seeks to address. Philpott argues that an effective conception of political reconciliation must address such injustices, and he roots his conception in a mix of religious and legal doctrines and traditions: human rights, restorative justice, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He offers a conception of transitional justice that goes well beyond the liberal peace.

Philpott’s project is to find the points of commonality between these traditions. Some scholars see Islamic notions of punishment as antithetical to human rights, or Christian notions of forgiveness as antithetical to punishment, or restorative justice as antithetical to the prevailing penalistic account of transitional justice. Philpott offers a different point of view, one that acknowledges the tensions within and between these traditions, but that ultimately highlights how—in relation to political injustices—each of them is geared toward righting relationships that have been wounded. He also shows how the liberal and religious transitional-justice vocabularies are fundamentally convergent. The former uses terms like civic trust and social capital, and the latter terms like harmony and reconciliation, but for all intents and purposes they focus on the common end-game that Philpott calls “right relationship.”

I believe that Philpott gets it right by viewing transitions out of war and dictatorship as being simultaneously, and fundamentally, about the treatment of wounds and the restoration of relationships. Societies in transition require fixes that go far beyond the technical or individual levels. They are societies broken on moral, legal, and political levels, perhaps even on spiritual levels. Whole new relationships need to be reimagined, reconstructed, and reconfigured. This is the most important priority in achieving the kind of beyond-liberal “just peace” that Philpott refers to in the title of his book. And it is clear that Philpott sees transitional justice as an integral part of the exercise because of its capacity to transform the human and institutional relationships that are the basis for any stable society. As he states in the book: “One of the most important goals of practices of political reconciliation is to change the judgments that people form in response to political injustices….” (46).

In addition to offering a coherent framework for his ideas, Philpott introduces a number of memorable terms, such as “overlapping consensus,” “rooted reason,” “personalism,” and the “standing victory of the perpetrator’s injustice.” The latter is of particular interest. Philpott uses this to express the idea that right relationship (i.e., political reconciliation) cannot be achieved as long as there is a perception of political injustice. This leads him to embrace rather than reject punishment and atrocity trials as part of his overall theory. But his embrace is not a maximalist one: he favors a “presumption of punishment” but contests the assertion that punishment and atrocity trials can never give way to competing priorities. I share this view, which is a rational one if you start from the premise that successful transitions may in some cases require principled suspensions of criminal justice.

However, while I am in broad agreement with Philpott’s argument, let me also express some reservations.

First, I believe that the book may hold limited value for the transitional justice practitioner. The debates that it summarizes, and the case studies and examples cited, are not sufficiently new or original. They will be familiar, with the smallest of exceptions, to anyone knowledgeable about the core transitional justice literature of the last fifteen years. For example, Philpott makes reference throughout the book to major experiences of the field in the 1990s, such as those of Germany, Chile, South Africa, and Rwanda. Yet there is hardly any reference to the more complicated and well-covered cases that dominated the last decade of transitional justice discourse and practice, such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia. This gap leaves the book feeling somewhat dated and, however unintentionally, cherry-picked. It is even a greater shame that the book, despite being published in 2012, makes no reference to the Arab world’s revolutions and transitions, which have special relevance for a theoretical framework that seeks to reconcile Islam with a universalist rights-based account of political reconciliation.

Another reservation I have about Philpott’s book has to do with a feeling of “overreach.” In advancing an all-encompassing theory of political reconciliation that seeks to synergize traditions as diverse as human rights, restorative justice, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Philpott sometimes needs to stretch the ordinary meaning of certain terms in order to make them fit his theory—for example, by arguing that justice and political reconciliation, following his philosophical dissection, are one and the same. This kind of stretching of terms and traditions feels overwrought at times, giving the occasional sense that the book is as much a work of word-smithing as one of ideas. This is an understandable consequence of trying to advance a theory that will find agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument.

Finally, as much as I agree with the book’s substantive content, there are a few points with which I disagree. For example, Philpott boldly argues toward the end of his treatise that forgiveness of the perpetrator by the victim is necessary in order to fully overcome the standing victory of a perpetrator’s injustice. This is one of the only unconvincing, and arguably unnecessary, parts of his otherwise compelling treatise. He simply does not make the case convincingly enough that political reconciliation is incomplete without forgiveness. Other minor quibbles I could note are of less consequence to his overall thesis. For example, there is very little discussion about vetting—a crucial tool for righting the state-society relationship—and what little discussion he includes is oddly located under the section on punishment rather than the one on “building socially just institutions.” Similarly, Philpott’s treatment of apology as an entirely separate section from the one on reparations is surprising, as is his treatment of amnesty, which he mistakenly describes as a subcategory of pardon rather than the reverse and which he oddly locates within the section on punishment rather than on forgiveness.

Ultimately, though, I cannot but admire the ambition of Philpott’s book and the sheer breadth of topics it covers. His formulation of “political reconciliation” is generally convincing and in time may come to influence transitional justice theory and terminology. His more integrated approach to the issues is one that ought to be widely endorsed, especially in a time when the theory and practice of transitional justice have become counter-productively and illogically synonymous with the fight against impunity.

Before we come back to the epistemic status of religious interpretation and diverse public theologies, we should highlight the current status of peacebuilding and post-conflict justice initiatives. For years, we have followed the failure of an understanding that solely focuses on finding the culprits and punishing them for the past injustices. The operational successes of the international courts do not usually translate into positive peace, stable governance, and sound economic development. Conflicts erupt again or at the very least, structural violence continues. We can even say that we are in a state of crisis and the recipes developed in the offices of international organizations are not of much help. Philpott’s book emphasizes these gaps in our understanding. His concept of “restorative justice” and review of six practices of political reconciliation (namely, building just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment and forgiveness) remind the ideals one should pursue in peacebuilding. However, such a holistic approach to complicated processes requires us to overcome our biases in the field and one of the biggest steps towards this goal is taking religion seriously.

One widespread bias in the field is manifested through dismissing religion as an emotional, irrational and arbitrary element. Liberal skeptics dismiss the role of religious “knowledge” and the significance of reconciliation in attaining a long term peace. I have argued elsewhere that religious leaders and networks constitute epistemic communities with their expertise, competence and policy relevant knowledge in theology. Religious traditions offer insights in multiple fields ranging from development to human rights. In that sense, religious knowledge follows Weberian “value rationality” and it is part of the Foucauldian post-modern episteme that champions the spiritual dimension while acknowledging the scientific advances. The mere existence of conferences, conventions, and peer-reviewed publications in theology shows the presence of a structured expert community, criticisable, and refutable knowledge in text analysis, interpretation, and application. One can even claim that theology comes close to following a Weberian “formal rationality” when it comes to hermeneutics and exegesis.

Religious epistemic communities of peacebuilding and reconciliation have become much more prominent in the last couple of decades. These networks are familiar not only with the sources their respective traditions provide, but also with the local conditions, sensitivities and expectations. Given that a significant portion of the peacebuilding terminology is borrowed from scriptural sources, religious leaders should be seen as natural contributors to debates surrounding healing of wounds. Unfortunately, religious roots of reconciliation and forgiveness are often conveniently forgotten. Philpott brings these roots back to the scene and he traces the development and transformation of some vital concepts of restorative justice within theological frameworks. Examples in the book include the concept of “solidarity”, and how Jurgen Moltman, among others, contributed to the concept as a theologian; the meanings of shalom (peace) and teshuva (repentance) in Judaic tradition and how they are manifested in different writings; and the possibilities sulh, the concept of conciliation in Islam, provides in post-conflict settings. Beyond this epistemological dimension, reconciliation means addressing traumas and recovery of what has been lost both materially and spiritually. It means restoring trust and hope. Such a sensitive process requires a wide array of methods, tools and dimensions, including practices associated with religion. Philpott’s conceptualization of restorative justice shows that such an integrated approach is possible and each practice of political reconciliation can not only easily be located in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but also sometimes directly emerge from religious traditions.

One common misjudgment in conflict transformation is that religion is illogical and irrational, and it cannot be part of policy debates due to its arbitrary nature. However, religious actors and secular ones can converse using similar standards. As Philpott notes, arguments solely from fiat or private revelation “typify bad religious arguments, not religious arguments per se” (111) and religious arguments are “amenable to examination, understanding, consideration, criticism, partial agreement, contradiction and argument…” In many official settings, religious language is ruled out from the very beginning. This is unfortunately a loss for those of us who work towards peace—those who initiate violence are more willing to tap into religious justifications than those who want to bring justice and stability.

The second important contribution I mentioned in the beginning—and an important distinction—that the book makes is the recognition of the changing nature of public theologies, or in Scott Appleby’s words, the “ambivalence of the sacred” in peace processes. In his work on religion and comparative politics, Philpott has already elaborated on political theologies and differentiation of political structures. This work is significant as it tackles religious manifestations on an institutional level and does not assume that a given tradition has fixed traits. In settings ranging from Argentina to Rwanda, religious institutions have supported dictatorial regimes or did nothing to intervene in the human rights violations. Once again though, this is more of an institutional deficit rather than a norm that can be attributed to a religious tradition. To put it bluntly, discarding religious resources due to bad institutional practices and narrow ideologies is as meaningless as doing away with the field of economics altogether because some banks contributed to a financial crisis.

Unfortunately, many academics and peacebuilders still leave out religion in conversations about justice and stability. Once again, this is mostly due to frustration with institutions. I observed this lack of confidence in religious institutions when I was conducting research on the role of religious actors in conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. There were courageous and quite influential religious leaders like Fr. Alex Reid, Cardinal Cahal Daly, Rev. Harold Good, Rev. John Dunlop and Archbishop Robin Eames who played roles in realizing a stable Northern Irish society. However, members of the civil society working on the peace process expressed their disappointment with the churches as institutions while acknowledging the contributions of individual religious leaders and their theologies of co-existence and peace. Another observation I made as an outsider was that elite members of the civil society, political parties and academia were much more resistant to exploring the full potential of religious discourse in reconciliation than people on the street. I also experienced such an instance of resistance on a panel about Israeli-Palestinian peace process I once chaired. I asked the participants (prominent Israeli and Palestinian civil society representatives) about the potential role of religious actors in conciliation and building alternative communication channels. In one voice, five panelists turned to me and said that “there is no place for religion; whenever religion comes into picture, things get worse.” It was a bit ironic that the panel was organized by a Judaic Studies department—the religion dimension was there even if the participants had not thought about it.

To conclude, Philpott opens the way for a healthy discussion of the role of religious traditions and actors by introducing an ethic of political reconciliation. Just and Unjust Peace is a fascinating piece of work that is in the intersection of religious studies, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. It takes religious knowledge as well as experience of reconciliation and peacebuilding seriously; it reveals many possibilities religious traditions contain within themselves towards achieving restorative justice. Most importantly, the book does not bring in religion at the expense of the secular approaches but as a necessary complement to them. That is why it is a required reading for social scientists, religious studies/theology scholars who are interested in reconciliation as well as NGO officials who are in search of inclusive ways of attaining a long lasting peace.

I begin with this observation about our contemporary moment’s deep commitment to the child as an essential identity position. I note that this commitment exists despite the dramatic, really unprecedented, variability in those individuals who are categorized as children—and despite the way that aging is always already inflecting, transforming, and finally eroding the child such that someone can never be a child in the way that they can be male or female, black or white. I do so because the corpus of material related to sex abuse and the Catholic Church uniformly relies on this cultural commitment to the child. Cardinal Bernard Francis Law apologizes for his failure to see that the protection of children must be the church’s single focus and top priority, and his admission that he has only recently come to understand this fact—to see that the child’s need for protection trumps the church’s need to avoid scandal—points to the extent of the problem and of the church’s perceived gross negligence. Therefore despite the church’s historical emphasis on the child as a privileged vehicle of faith (in other words, having the faith of a child) and the significant place that childhood sexual innocence has in Catholic tradition (immaculate conception, for example), real children, as the documents compiled by BishopAccountability.org tell us time and again, bear the violent brunt of the lived distance between Catholic theory and practice—between the mandate that priests remain celibate and the stark reality of sexual need.

It is therefore specifically the sexual abuse of children that is the thrust of current social critique and moral outrage directed against the Catholic Church—a moral outrage so intense as to even motivate recent efforts to bring charges against the Vatican for crimes against humanity. While I do not want to minimize the magnitude of these crimes, I would, for a moment, like to bracket single-focused attention on them in order to add a few salient observations that might help us make sense not so much of the events but of what can appear in some of these documents to be an outraged and increasingly shrill response to them. I do so in the spirit of one trained as a literary and cultural theorist not as a religious studies scholar, and it would be my hope that the questions someone with my training might ask would shed productive light on the issues, precisely because of my discipline’s critical distance from the core fracture lines and questions that have tended to shape popular debate.

First, it is useful to remind ourselves of something that we all know—that the child has long been the privileged occasion and overwrought site for scientific, social, and personal narratives of sexual development and deterioration. We need look no further than psychoanalytic theory itself to be reminded of the child’s longstanding and foundational importance to our contemporary understanding of sexuality and to the burgeoning fields of sexuality studies. From Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, to recent queer theorists and cultural studies scholars like James Kincaid, Lee Edelman, and Chris Nealon, the child has long been the point of origin from which to think and rethink narratives of individual sexual identity and development. The child is the scaffolding on which we tend to build our stories of sexual identity, replete with its minor chords of transgression and regression, as well as progression. In The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, Kincaid explores the social implications of this tendency to infuse the child with sexual content and meaning. The practice he terms “child-loving” has, from the nineteenth century forward, carried a latent erotic dimension for adults in ways that both belie and inform the heavy, overwrought artifice of innocence that we have constructed supposedly to protect children from the contaminating forces of the adult world.

It is provocative, of course, to insist that our love for children is not always nonsexual in nature and motive, that there is a continuum rather than a binary opposition between sex abuse and platonic child love. On the one hand, psychoanalytic theory encourages us to turn to the child to find traces and to see the origins of a ubiquitous, inchoate sexuality of which we attempt to make sense throughout our lives; on the other hand, we insist that children are sexually innocent and hermetically sealed from these very enduring, at times chaotic, sexual forces. Even as we commit to the idea that the child is innocent, sexually passionless, and in need of protection, we increasingly weigh this child down with fraught sexual meanings and content.

The large-scale social, cultural, and political implications of this fact are fleshed out nowhere more provocatively than in the work of Ian Hacking. His foundational 1991 essay “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse” summarizes the current situation in which we find ourselves as follows:

Some evil actions are public. Others are private. Child abuse is the worst of private evils. We know we want to put a stop to it. We know we can’t, but we must protect as many children as we can, and help those who have been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster.

And yet, even as we believe that child abuse means something definite, the behaviors that fall under the rubric of child abuse have changed dramatically over the last hundred years, such that many of the things that we currently identify as abusive were standard practice in the recent past. In other words, we’ve unwittingly and gradually been changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our moral codes accordingly.

The reason I bring Hacking up in detail here is that he reminds us of an important aspect of our urgent and visceral impulse to protect children from abusive behavior, in this case, from the abuse of priests and the church they call home. We can see that this impulse, powerful as it is, is itself indicative of our particular historical moment, and socially constructed to effect particular social transformations at the current time. It isn’t that the abuse that the children suffered in the various Catholic dioceses is warranted or acceptable or that we should overlook or minimize it as church authorities have tended to do. But how we respond to and understand these events—the outrage we feel and the emotions we let loose—are inevitably part of larger social and political processes of which we need to be aware. And, whether or not we would agree with Hacking’s conclusion that the historically unprecedented number of behaviors that now ‘count’ as child abuse are part and parcel of a larger reallocation of social responsibility from the state onto the individual (in this case the abusive adult priest and an institution that stands in uneasy relation to the state), his assertion that child abuse is one avenue through which the state negotiates and reallocates social responsibility is useful for thinking about how the child that is the centerpiece of these cases of church abuse might be operating, in this case, in the larger push and pull between church and state.

As the documents compiled at BishopAccountability.org make clear, children are the rope in the ongoing tug of war between church and state. The conflict would have an inherently different feel if the sexual abuse of power were between adults. Popular antebellum narratives in the form of the escaped nun’s memoir (I think here of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures or Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent) claimed to document women’s sexual abuse within convent walls. However subsequently disproven they were, these accounts were so effective as to result in riots—in angry mobs, for example, literally burning down the Ursuline convent that Reed wrote about. At the particular time in which Monk, Reed, and others told their sensationalized stories of sexual abuse at the hands of nefarious priests, the public felt great dis-ease with the pressures that the influx of new Catholic immigrants were exerting on civic resources. Outraged readers who stormed convents looking for proof of nuns’ sexual abuse at the hands of corrupt priests were animated by a desire to regulate and bring under public control what was going on within the privacy of the convent or confessional, in an effort to manage and control a perceived threat to the sanctity and very durability of the state.

If these accounts of women’s sexual abuse at the hands of priests were the subject of violent social outrage in the nineteenth century, children seem to be functioning narratively in a similar way in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In addition to their truth value and the accuracy of their content, these contemporary accounts of sexual abuse of power have a secondary and collateral effect of vilifying a church that stands in uneasy relation to the hegemony of the nation-state. By contextualizing the current narratives within a longer history of popular depictions of the Vatican’s complicity in priests’ abuses of power, we can begin to see how these contemporary allegations and abuses of power might inadvertently work to further a state agenda of bringing Catholic church practices and those individuals who implement church authority under state control, surveillance, and regulation.

This effort to exert state authority over church life—and church resistance to the encroaching state control—shapes the very language that both constituencies use to narrate recent history. When victims say that they don’t accuse abusive priests of sin, but rather of crime, they are drawing a crucial distinction between spheres of influence to insist that priests, like all citizens, are subject to state authority. Conversely, when Bishop Thomas Daily says he is not a policeman but a shepherd, he is insisting on the church’s distance from such authority. And when the 2002 grand jury report on the Rockville Centre describes the abusers as “predatory, serial, child molesters working as priests” rather than “priests troubled with the human frailty and sinfulness in need of succor and protection,” they are insisting that state definitions and the law that upholds them precede and preempt the logic of the church.

Children’s significance to this negotiation and struggle for control extends beyond their role as victim of abuse, and the child—as metaphor, imaginative construct, and developmental stage of life—is a powerful referent that molds how those on all sides of the conflict conceptualize, describe, and understand the current situation. Church leaders often narrate the course of events surrounding their response to abuse reports in ways that associate themselves with childlike qualities—as ingénues who didn’t have the knowledge, the experience, or the wisdom that they needed in order to contend with issues of such magnitude. If these leaders self-describe as being developmentally immature, inexperienced, and innocent at the time the abuse surfaced, offending priests are often described as being like the children they abuse. John Geoghan, for example, is described by the rector of St John’s Seminary in 1954 as having “a very pronounced immaturity,” with psychological testing showing an “immature and impulsive nature.” The Grand Jury Report of the Rockville Centre includes a facility report that observes that Priest C “was still attracted to adolescents and indeed strongly considered himself to be one.” Even congregants who welcome priests into their homes explain their misplaced trust by describing the priest as being like one of their children. Perpetrator as well as victim reach for the cultural category of the child in order to explain and mitigate their culpability and to lay claim to the position of innocent victim rather than pernicious perpetrator.

And so it is not simply that children were systematically abused under church authority, but that the idea of the child as a vulnerable subject in need of special protection and succor has seeped into every aspect of the narratives we are generating around these events. In other words, the child’s privileged status as a person in need of special protections and advocacy is being utilized by every constituency at the table—from the adult priests’ and bishops’ claims that they are child-like to adult victims’ ongoing self-identification as children—and is the unacknowledged driver in the tense struggle over authority that is ensuing between church and state. A scan of the powerful materials compiled by BishopAccountability.org reveals how much of the current debate about sex abuse and the Catholic Church depends on a sharp opposition between child and adult. Not only do victims and their families emphasize victims’ minority (even when victims exceed the child’s legal age limit) but priests repeatedly liken themselves to children, as part of an effort to self-understand as victim rather than perpetrator. It is this dimension of the debate—so often unrecognized—that gives accusations and refutations of abuse such emotional force and power.

As you can see, the questions that literary and cultural studies might productively bring to the child abuse and study of religion analytic field are ones concerned with relations between individuals, institutions, and the state and the way that the complex meaning-making that the child occasions as an identity category is integral to that process. Further, focus on the child as a powerfully constituting dimension of this analytic field helps to tease out the delicate dance in which church and state are both involved about authority, privacy, financial resources, and ultimately the legislation of bodies as well as selves. Literary and cultural studies scholars have paid all too little attention to religion in textual analysis. We, and I include myself in this, have tended to conceptualize the child’s significance to cultural formations in secular terms—to see the child as a complex identity category interfacing with a state pried loose from spiritual concerns. The intellectual challenge that this archive offers is one that asks us to revisit this assumption and to see the child as embedded in the crosshairs of spiritual, sexual, and secular concerns. Doing so offers us the possibility of seeing the full implications of our current abiding commitment to the child as our last essential identity category. It also offers us the possibility of seeing the way that church as well as state turn to this last bastion of pre-postmodern humanism in efforts to shore up their constituencies. And, finally, it offers us the opportunity to perceive how the child for whom we urgently advocate operates in the struggle for authority, power, market share, and resources between the two.

I find mangled lives among those we now call the abused, but also among the abusers. I don’t say that lightly, abstractly. There are, in the identified abusers, some men who seem so far beyond our ordinary talk about ethics that they are “monsters” according to one old sense of the word. But there are other men—perfectly familiar, much sadder—who now get swept up into the same category of abuser.

I remember a former student. Once ordained a new priest, he began in his mid-20s what he viewed as a consensual sexual relationship with a 17-year-old.

Is it wrong for a Catholic priest to begin a sexual relationship with anyone committed to his pastoral care? Yes, it is, and for a number of reasons—including, in my view, because it violates a public vow of celibacy that underwrites claims to holy authority.

Is it worse when the person under care is below the legal age of consent? Yes, though I am less concerned with the legal age of consent than with the age of ethical agency. Both of these ages vary astonishingly by time, place, and person.

Is the sexual relationship in such a case always monstrous? Must the offending priest be treated for the rest of his life on the assumption that he is violently insane and irredeemably corrupt? Here I stop, not least because I remember that the rhetoric of monstrosity has regularly been deployed in church campaigns against sodomites—and in medico-legal judgments against a whole array of perverts that includes homosexuals. The current stigmatization of sex abusers in the Roman Catholic clergy is sometimes uncannily like old ecclesiastical or civil campaigns that most of us would deplore—campaigns against sodomites, witches, heretics, against child masturbators or hysterical mothers or congenital homosexuals.

Am I suggesting that we should tolerate or even affirm those who commit sexual abuse? No. I am suggesting that we should listen to the rhetoric of our condemnations, because whatever their justice, they often echo condemnations that would have been applied to many of us fifty years ago—that still are applied to many of us by the Catholic magisterium.

Let me raise three sorts of questions about the rhetoric in some appalling documents from the dossier of Robert Meffan—in regard to pathology, mysticism, and authority.

I begin with the wholesale incorporation into these documents of psychiatric or psychological categories and models, especially with regard to sex or sexuality. You can see this in the Review Board finding on Meffan, which not only cites as decisive a “personality profile,” but which deploys various psychological categories to describe him. You can also see, as in so many cases, an abuser being handed off to the therapeutic system. Indeed, the review board overrules the recommendation that Meffan be allowed to live with his cousin in order to enroll him in a “structured aftercare program.”

You discover here, as in other dossiers, the models and the mechanisms of various psychiatric theories. The models entered Catholic discourses in the last century without much reflection. There is a first wave shortly after 1900, when late nineteenth-century sexology is incorporated into some advanced confessors’ manuals. Then, from the 1940s on, pathological categories like “homosexuality” begin to appear in essays of moral theology, especially those written under the influence of psychoanalysis. Beginning in the 1950s, “homosexuality” and related categories figure in canonical documents—e.g., in the expert opinions submitted to diocesan tribunals or to the Roman Rota. From 1960 on, there is also a growing reliance on psychological testing of applicants to seminaries and religious orders, especially when it comes to sexuality. Increasingly, the clinician, not the spiritual director, is asked to render an expert judgment on a candidate’s suitability.

You are reading, then, a historically recent and variously motivated incorporation of clinical languages. I’m not suggesting that these languages have no place in talking about abuse or that church authorities should never rely on them. I do note that the institutional authority of the clinician functions incoherently beside older theological categories and traditional claims about church authority. In Scholastic theories, there was supposed to be a clear delegation of responsibility: the clinician could investigate natural pathologies empirically, but the spiritual director reserved for himself supernatural knowledge of the soul’s true condition and destiny. In hurried practice, church officials often deferred to prevailing psychiatric authority—especially when it came to sexual disorders. But how exactly was a pathological model of sexual abuse supposed to cohere with Scholastic theologies of sins against the sixth commandment?

To address this question well, a reader would need other documents not in Meffan’s dossier. For example, there should be samples from the history of the category “pedophilia” in other institutions, both the short history (say, the influence of the work of David Finkelhor) and the longer history (say, the 1867 case of Jouy described by Foucault in Abnormal and History of Sexuality Vol. 1).

A reader would also need to ask about the contrast between the ecclesiastical bureaucracy’s acceptance of clinical conclusions about pedophilia and its rejection of clinical conclusions about homosexuality—or masturbation. According to the letter on the “problem of homosexuality” published by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986, “the Church can not only convert scientific discoveries to its use, but also transcend their perspective,” since its perspective is so much larger than the scientific. By what reasoning does “the Church” transcend the scientific perspective so completely on homosexuality as to reverse basic conclusions, while remaining within the perspective so completely in the case of pedophilia? Is this difference a matter of theological reasoning—or rather of the realities of legal liability and popular opinion? Would “the Church” prefer to “transcend” psychiatric accounts of pedophilia too if it could get away with doing so?

Maybe not. Church officials sometimes want to transcend psychiatry, but sometimes they want to use it. They have deployed various strategies to deflect blame for failing to restrain clerical abusers, not least by pinning abuse on the admission of gay candidates to seminary and the religious life. This deflection can be crude (as when it was floated at a Vatican news conference in February 2002) or indirect (as in the recently released second Jay College report). Either way, the strategy relies on the assumption of an immutable pathology: Homosexual men snuck into the priesthood. They suffer from a pathology that makes them commit sexual crimes. Everyone knows that we can’t be blamed for their pathology. We can’t do anything except kick them out—while we establish strict screening procedures to prevent any more of the sick perverts from sneaking in. In plainer English: We reject 1990s science about the natural origin of healthy homosexuality in favor of 1890s science about homosexuality as a fixed, criminal pathology. Is reverting to discredited scientific theories “transcending” science?

From questions raised by pathological language, I turn to more traditional theological rhetoric. In Meffan’s dossier, there are reports that he relied on the rhetoric of mystical theology. You can read his language for yourself in the startling statement signed “Prisoner of Love.” The use of theological or liturgical language to cover prohibited sex is nothing new. There are hints of it in the accusations Peter Damian makes against sodomitic priests in his Gomorran Book (from 1050 CE), and there is a surprising parallel to Meffan in the inquisitorial records from a convent in Pescia in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The Theatine abbess, Benedetta Carlini, not only channeled Jesus’ commands that she should marry a younger nun in an elaborate wedding, but took on the person of a handsome angel, Splenditello, to conduct an erotic relationship with her (for all of which see Judith Brown, Immodest Acts).

I wish it were so simple as saying that Meffan abuses religious language to procure sexual gratification. That is what Peter Damian, patron saint of the theology of sodomy, wants us to believe, and it is suggested again by some of the testimony against Meffan. But I find the plea from the Prisoner of Love more troubling than that. Some parts of the text seem all too sincere: “I could still say Mass privately each morning, becoming one with my loving Christ. I could still tell Him over and over again that I loved Him.”

The possibility of authorizing abuse theologically follows too easily from the always exceptional status claimed for modern church power. In modern Catholic contexts, official languages often pretend to be exempt from qualification, questioning, or appeal. They are absolute languages. They function in a state of exception. When that rhetorical character is extended to traditional images of a masculinized God or angel who ravishes—rapes—souls that are gendered as feminine, then erotic domination seems to receive divine blessing. I’m not objecting to mystical writing. I’m pointing to a consequence of moving older mystical or liturgical languages into a modern system that endows some church speech with an incontestable and literal authority. Under a regime that claims divine exemption for its decrees, mustn’t erotic metaphors of divine domination sometimes seem to authorize sexual demands by priests? Turn the question around: imagine what you would have to change in present claims for church language to prevent the violent misapplication of old metaphors for God’s love.

Which brings me to the last rhetoric I want to mention: the homoerotic undertone of ecclesiastical obedience. The documents from the Meffan case are not homoerotic in the obvious sense—they are not about male-male or female-female abuse. They concern sexual acts between a man and girls or young women. But the male and female bodies here allow us to notice another level at which the homoerotic can appear in church speech. Take as an example Meffan’s letter to Cardinal Law, with its touches of studied obsequiousness, its acts of enticing submission. Those rhetorical gestures reveal desires sedimented in now standard forms of clerical power.

Whenever I was asked to contribute a sound-bite to the news coverage of the Boston cases in 2002, I tried to insist that the real scandal was not that there were abusers in the priesthood, but that they had been protected by church authority—not out of concern for their well-being or, God knows, for the safety of parishioners, but because of the hierarchical system’s imperative to protect itself. The scandal, I used to repeat, is the system.

Even that sound-bite has two meanings. It means that there is a large institution with all sorts of urgent motives for wanting to insure its authority, to keep its secrets, to protect its accumulated treasure. But the sound-bite also means that sexual abuse is coded into the system itself. It is expressed within the system before it is inflicted on those outside. We must listen to those who are abused by priests, but we should listen then for the cries of the abuse by which many priests are formed as priests. Abuse—not infrequently sexual, typically erotic—is required for this late-modern system of clerical power. It operates on the bodies of many children and adolescents, some of whom are being groomed for priesthood and religious life. Father says, “You have a vocation.” What appalling words those can be.

Sexual abuse of children is far from new. Historians of the family have discovered that adults in elite households in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe sometimes treated young children as sexual playthings. A striking example involves the future King of France, Louis XIII. According to a diary kept by the royal physician, members of the French royal court fondled his genitals and ladies in waiting played sexual games with his tiny fists.

But if the sexual abuse of minors is anything but a recent phenomenon, only intermittently has this country focused on the problem. Three conclusions grow out of the historical study of the sexual abuse of minors. The first is how slowly and unevenly American society has come to recognize the simple fact that the sexual abuse of minors is wrong and inflicts lasting trauma. The second is that in attempting to understand the sexual abuse of minors, expert opinion has often shown more understanding for the perpetrators than the victims, overemphasizing victims’ resilience and minimizing the abusers’ responsibility and the corporate cultures and institutional arrangements that facilitate abuse. The third key finding is that bureaucratic institutions that operate outside public scrutiny have dealt consistently with the sexual abuse by denying its reality, ignoring its existence, claiming that it is an anomaly and aberration, castigating accusers, and failing to hold perpetrators to account.

That the young were sexually abused was well known to nineteenth-century Americans. In New York City, between 1790 and 1876, between a third and a half of rape victims were under the age of 19; during the 1820s, the figure was 76 percent. The historian Lynn Sacco found more than 500 published newspaper reports of father-daughter incest between 1817 and 1899. An 1894 textbook, A System of Legal Medicine, reported that the “rape of children is the most frequent form of sexual crime.”

In his landmark study of female sexual behavior, published in 1953, Alfred Kinsey reported that fully a quarter of all girls under the age of 14 reported that they had experienced some form of sexual abuse, including exhibitionism, fondling, or incest (at rates roughly similar to those reported today). Yet when these findings were reported, they evoked virtually no public interest, although Kinsey’s statistics about pre-marital sexual activity and adultery provoked a huge public outcry.

Public attention to the sexual abuse of minors has waxed and waned repeatedly over time. Concern was greatest following the Civil War, during the Progressive era, during and immediately after World War II, and in our own time (see Elizabeth Pleck and Linda Gordon). Public concern does not appear to reflect increases in the incidence of abuse, but rather broader social anxieties, especially over the entry of women into the workforce, and the influence of groups willing to bring a pressing problem to public light. Following the Civil War, the rapid growth of cities, a massive influx of immigrants, and a sharp rise in the divorce rate provoked fears for the future of the family and alarm over the supposed impact of the breakdown of the family upon children. During the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, anxieties over mass immigration, divorce, child labor, and juvenile delinquency helped stimulate public concern over the abuse of children. During World War II, concerns about working mothers, latchkey children, and absent fathers sparked public anxiety. During the 1970s, a sharp increase in divorce, single parenthood, and working mothers contributed to a heightened sensitivity to childhood sexual abuse.

At first, public concern focused on the very young, those ten or younger. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, philanthropists and reformers brought attention to a somewhat older group of those aged eleven to seventeen. Reformers fought to raise the age of consent to sixteen and to enact laws to prevent those younger than sixteen from entering any place that sold intoxicants, pool halls, and dance halls. It comes as a surprise to contemporaries to discover that raising the age of consent required concerted political battles.

In courthouses, the treatment of sexual abuse was colored by a young person’s age, gender, and willingness to conform to cultural stereotypes. For a long time, jurors treated young girls very differently from boys and older girls. Sexual activity with young girls was clearly regarded as pathological by the late nineteenth century, but proving cases of abuse proved very difficult. Jurors expected a young girl to reveal her innocence by using vague, simple, euphemistic language, while expecting older girls to put up resistance or demonstrate immaturity and a lack of sexual understanding. Interestingly, men charged with sodomizing pubescent boys were convicted in the same proportions as those whose victims were young boys, but this was not the case with girls.

At first, the focus was on physical harm to the young person or the ruin to their reputation; nothing was said about the psychological scars caused by abuse until the 1930s. 30 percent of statutory rape cases from 1896 to 1926 sought to resolve the case by marriage or financial payment.

For much of the twentieth century, sexual abuse of children was treated as an anomaly and aberration perpetrated by moral monsters who were increasingly understood in psychological terms: as dirty old men, sexual fiends, perverts, predators, pedophiles, or sexual psychopaths. Evidence—such as venereal infections in children—indicating that sexual abuse of children was not confined to a small number of sex predators was dismissed and blamed on such non-sexual causes as unhygienic toilet seats.

The twentieth century witnessed a number of attempts to understand the sexual abuse of minors. The emergence of theories of young peoples’ psychosexual development and especially the embrace of the Freudian notion of the sexual child had ambiguous consequences for understanding of sexual abuse. Among some experts, there was a tendency to deny that sexual abuse had lasting consequences. But among others, there was a growing sense that abuse, even abuse short of genital penetration, caused long-term psychological damage. It is important to stress the contestation that surrounded the impact of abuse. Race and class colored expert opinion on the sexual abuse of minors. By mid-century, expert opinion tended to regard working-class, and especially black, children as more prematurely sexualized and more endowed with sexual instincts and desire than their middle-class white counterparts. Meanwhile, offenders were regarded mentally ill and treatable through psychotherapy. Their problem, purportedly, was that they lacked emotional and sexual maturity. Within the courts, there was a tendency to substitute prosecution of sexual molestation for prosecution for rape. On the one hand, this meant that adults could be prosecuted for crimes of touching. On the other hand, punishments tended to be less severe than the law suggested. During the 1990s, there was a backlash against the trend toward vigorous prosecution of sexual abuse cases. A panic over allegations of sexual abuse in day care centers, in which over a hundred day care workers were convicted of abuse only to have the prosecution claims overturned in virtually every instance, raised questions about repressed memories, the suggestibility of young witnesses, and issues of consent.

The problem with the “psychologizing” of the sexual abuse of minors was the failure to understand the cultures of sexual abuse—including the clerical culture of the Church—which allow abuse to take place. Sexual abuse flourishes in environments with unequal power relationships. Factors that allow sexual abuse to flourish include isolation and social disconnection, both of the abused and the abuser; emotionally needy and disempowered young people; a self-validating ideology that rationalizes abuse; institutional settings that shield individuals from public scrutiny; and institutions intent on protecting their reputation and safeguarding themselves from liability—and that do so in part by decentralizing decision-making about crucial issues.

Defenders of the church’s handling of the sexual abuse scandals often insist that the church’s problems were no greater than those found in other institutions; that only a tiny proportion of priests were ever accused of abuse; and that the church hierarchy dealt with abuse in line with the received wisdom of the time. These defenders also maintain that the abuse was a historical problem linked to a specific era, which has now past, and that the church was especially vulnerable because it maintained detailed records. There is some truth to each of these claims. Yet none of them in any way mitigate the abuse that took place. The church is held to a higher standard precisely because it has a moral obligation to meet the highest moral standards. Because the Catholic Church recognizes that all human beings are sinful, it should have recognized that even its clerics can sin and that only strict supervision and accountability can minimize it.

Physicians, psychologists, and criminal codes (e.g., Texas state law) largely agree on what constitutes the sexual abuse of children by an adult. It includes, but is not limited to, the sexual touching of any part of the body, clothed or unclothed; penetrative sex, including penetration of the mouth; encouraging a child to engage in sexual activity, including masturbation; intentionally engaging in sexual activity in front of a child; showing children pornography, or using children to create pornography; and encouraging a child to engage in prostitution.

What I want to tackle, immediately, is the fraught relationship between effect and affect in this subject for those of us who seek to interpret it. It is difficult to write or think about sex abuse without being affected by its circulating effects, without feeling that the very practices of academic analysis do something suffocating to its experience. To think about sex abuse in an academic context could suggest that we might wish to think away its awfulness; to write about sex abuse could suggest that we seek to argue away its visceral trauma.

Scholarly practice replies to such worry with bravado, assuming that our studied neutrality will offer fair view to every contributing party. Yet this is the very neutrality that so troubles subjects of our analysis, since it suggests that everyone deserves understanding, regardless of their actions. This is a perspective to which few victims of such violence can accede.

Even if we bracket the voice of such victims in our academic work, we cannot imagine that we have bracketed their call for judgment upon their perpetrators. To be sure, scholars sometimes imagine that a responsible account is an account that withholds judgment. “I just try to explain what happened,” one historian tells me. “I don’t judge what they did.” This is an evasion of responsibility; interpretation is judgment. We cannot imagine that our default to historicism will spare us our job as arbiters. We are always in the story, no matter our attempt to abstract ourselves from it through various modes of scientism, humanist and otherwise. “For even a world equation that contained everything, so that the observer of the system would also be included in the equations, would still assume the existence of a physicist who, as the calculator, would not be an object calculated,” Hans Georg Gadamer writes, concluding, “Each science, as a science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.” To know them is to govern them. This is the struggling work of all scholarship: to acknowledge that its very free enactment by a solo thinker is also a practice of governance with others. How do we do this? How do we do this especially in cases where our subjects have already been governed in abusive ways?

This is not a new challenge in the history of scholarship. Those researchers who spend their time in the archives of genocide, slavery, or war have often offered observations on the strange role they, as scholars, play in their hermeneutics of those events. The decision to pursue sex abuse as a subject for the study of religion is a decision to enter into this murky methodological terrain. To ask, again: How do we do our work?

As a general criminological problem, psychological trauma, and sociological data point, sex abuse has received significant treatment within the social sciences. Yet within the humanities its study has been comparatively anemic. Perhaps because criminal actions seem to emerge from a pathological inhumanity, the humanist is less quick to grapple with the murderer than the murdered. Or perhaps it is that in the realm of the humanities, categories like murderer and perpetrator do not survive our interpretive imperative to understand our subjects in their particularity, to discern the human within and beyond classification. To fail to do so is, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel suggested, “abstract thinking: to see nothing in a murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.” Humanists work against such abstract thinking, and thereby produce short bibliographies on criminal categories. But this cannot mean that humanists refuse to acknowledge criminality. Indeed, the vast literatures on the subaltern and the oppressed suggest that there is an implicit adjudication at work within the humanities that privileges certain parties through the attention of interpretation. That there is no significant humanistic analysis of sex abusers is its own form of passive chastisement.

Over the next several weeks, The Immanent Frame will post remarks from a conference held on the campus of Yale University, “Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion.” That event sought to connect leading scholars in the humanities with the emerging documentary record of the Catholic sex abuse crisis. Although other religious groups have struggled with patterned sexual abuse, and although headlines report abuse in any number of educational and recreational organizations, it is the Roman Catholic Church that has experienced the greatest public scrutiny for this crime. Government investigations and tort litigation have extracted hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from diocesan and religious order archives describing abuse and its covert management within the Church. This conference, and these posts, seek to begin an interpretation of sex abuse as a subject for students of religion.

In 2004, John Jay College released a study of priest molestation that was commissioned and funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to which all the U.S. bishops belong. According to the resulting report, 4,392 priests have been accused of molestation in the four decades covered by the study. In the last ten years (except 2003), annual USCCB updates through the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) have brought the U.S. bishops’ total number of priests to 6,115, or 5.6% of the priests who worked during that time between 1950 and 2011. The same studies have counted 16,324 victims and have acknowledged that actual priest and victim counts are higher. The final tally of victims can only ever be a guess, although activist groups point out that sexual abuse is rarely a singular crime; most abusers repeated their behavior with multiple victims, often in multiple parish locations. Sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley estimated in 1993 that the victim population might be “well in excess of 100,000.”

Our goal was to explore the specifically Catholic cultural, theological, moral, even ontological, contexts within which this abuse took place, and then to consider the questions and issues this raises more broadly for the study of religion. To do this, we turned to an online archive developed by BishopAccountability.org, an organization that seeks to gather and preserve the archives emerging as a result of the sex abuse revelations in the Roman Catholic Church. Those archives pertain to sexual abuse and to many other topics of interest, from episcopal relations with Vatican congregations, to the implementation of Vatican II reforms and work with ethnic minorities in urban dioceses. Founded by Terence McKiernan, BishopAccountability.org is a Massachusetts non-profit corporation with approximately 125,000 pages of material posted online (and an archive of over 500,000 pages of material in their hardcopy library). BishopAccountability.org aims to facilitate the accountability of the U.S. bishops for their role in the abuse crisis, as they kept accused priests in ministry, failed to report abuse allegations to the authorities, and transferred accused priests to new parishes. To that end, BishopAccountability.org collects every conceivable document pertaining to sexual abuse in the Catholic church, including diocesan, religious order, and investigative files, grand jury reports, survivors’ accounts, and a wide variety of ecclesiastical documents, reports on church settlements, and journalistic accounts of the crisis. (Those interested in a survey of the kinds of materials available will profit from this introduction to their archives.) As their web site explains: “We document the debates about root causes and remedies, because important information has surfaced during those debates. We take no position on the root causes, and we do not advocate particular remedies. If the facts are fully known, the causes and remedies will become clear.”

If BishopAccountability.org defers the question of root causes, we begin with such interest foremost in our minds. Why did sex abuse occur? How did it occur? Why was it managed as it was by ecclesiastical authorities? What sacramental thinking and theological rhetoric has circulated during its duration? For example, how did Catholic understandings of the child and of the priest, or the distinctive Catholic construction of human sexuality—in particular the requirement of celibacy for leadership and prohibition of masturbation—contribute to the perpetuation of abuse? What sort of sexual politics, gender norms, cultural logic, and social facts contributed to the unmitigated persistence and slow diagnosis of abuse? And how does the very way we interpret and define abuse relate to its experience and practice?

Focused on bringing bishops to account and survivors to justice, BishopAccountability.org supplies an archive in service to the democratic, judicial, and therapeutic imperatives of the modern West. But archives do not interpret themselves. And this archive documents the very challenges facing the fulfillment of its activist ambition; BishopAccountability.org articulates democratic possibility while also recording in its files the various strategies and symptoms of democratic perversion.

Approaching the situation for this story requires acknowledging that certain interpretive shibboleths will be more problematic than assistive in our attempt to read it. Rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as documents of the clash between tradition and modernity; rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as profiles in criminality; and rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as tragedies from which individuals need justice, healing, and redemption, we also ask how the sex abuse cases are also cases of religion.

While it seems reasonable to imagine the celebration of the Mass or the substance of seminary education as subjects of analysis for the academic study of religion, turning to sexual abuse is a more awkward maneuver to make. However, scholarship pursuing popular religious experience offers some vocabulary to begin such a venture. “The study of lived religion focuses most intensely on places where people are wounded or broken, amid disruptions in relationships, because it is in these broken places that religious media become most exigent,” Robert Orsi has written. “It is in such hot cultural moments—at the edges of life, in times of social upheaval, confusion, or transition, when old orders give way and what is ahead remains unclear—that we see what matters most in a religious world.” Orsi invites us to observe the simultaneity of religious life and religious studies, how the scholar’s role to interpret what matters becomes especially important precisely when it seems that the system collapses in its effort to maintain what matters.

These “hot cultural moments” are rarely the ones accompanied by photographers’ flashbulbs or press releases. After reviewing the documentary record, the story of Catholic sex abuse that emerges is one of stunning intensity and intimacy. This was a series of crimes committed in quiet auspices, in recreational and domestic spaces, in vestries, campgrounds, and children’s bedrooms. This was a series of relationships that were, simultaneously, abusive and interdependent, public and private, possessive and devotional. Sexual abuse between priest and parishioner is, therefore, a form of lived religion. This is not only because religious contexts offer hierarchical social situations conducive to abuse, but also because abuse is, in this documentary record, shown to be an articulation of Catholic ecclesiastical authority, Catholic theological investment, and Catholic sociological change.

The religious aspect of this Catholic crisis only amplifies the ritual ecology of sexual abuse as a generalizable configuration. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry offers this description of the web of emotions that occurs in sexually abusive relationships:

The child of five or older who knows and cares for the abuser becomes trapped between affection or loyalty for the person, and the sense that the sexual activities are terribly wrong. If the child tries to break away from the sexual relationship, the abuser may threaten the child with violence or loss of love. When sexual abuse occurs within the family, the child may fear the anger, jealousy or shame of other family members, or be afraid the family will break up if the secret is told.

Within the documentary materials available, this standardized profile of abuse is rendered relentlessly specific to Catholicism. Sexual abuse is a practice within an existent relational dynamic, one that simultaneously transforms and calcifies the hierarchies and codes that determined the original affiliation. The psychiatric vocabulary above cannot begin to access the social economy and moral stakes of abuse within communities determined by parishes and families determined in part by ecclesiastical law. “Religion” as a category has no meaning if it is merely saved to designate ideal practice; it is a term that summarizes failure and fulfillment of prescribed relations. The essays in this series begin to access these peculiar relational enclaves of religious ideation and transgressing ritual.

No one is an expert yet on these materials. The scholars who will contribute to this series offer a wide range of perspectives to begin the necessarily long analysis of this phenomenon. To talk about sex abuse requires possessing as much hermeneutic nuance as humanly possible, since there is no escape hatch from its traumas for its survivors and the accused; for the perpetrators and the witnesses; for the children and their parents, their church and their broader communities. This is slow work. None of it will translate easily to a CNN crawl or abbreviated op-ed. But the answers supplied possess no less urgency because they are the result of careful close reading or hesitant hypothesis. Indeed, as I hope you’ll find, perhaps they are even more urgent, because they are more bracingly true, including as they do the ambiguity, contradiction, and self-deception inevitable in human action, yet often absent from our sloganeering about justice and consumption of scandal. While our conclusions are preliminary, our clamor for more work in this vein is absolute. There will be no true healing, no true reconciliation, and no true justice, absent the practice of humane interpretation.