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CHAPTER 3. DISGRACE Mary 1. I finish my revisions to this chapter one hour after Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott resigned his position, December 20, 2002, because of his infamous blunder recalling fondly the days of segregation before our nation had all of its “problems.” Nothing still so divides our country as the issue of racism, and racism’s true colors are revealed in such quick, top-of-the-head, off-the-cuff, winging-its. Lott’s remarks show how bigoted sentiments often lurk behind nostalgic utterances. CHAPTER 6. FORGIVENESS Mary I am grateful for the discussion and suggestions made on a draft of this chapter presented at the 2002 Bergamo Conference. I owe special thanks to Gaile S. Cannella and Radhika Viruru for troubling my remarks. 1. I use the unusual spelling in the manner of Kafka’s Amerika (New York: Schoken , 1962), to indicate his theme that justice is a form of discipline. This thesis is similar to that of Michel Foucault in his Discipline and punish:The birth of the prison (Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995), where he claims that forgiveness is a method employed to extort and criminalize. 2. As I revise this chapter, the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop of the Diocese of Boston, has been announced, December 13, 2002. 3. For an extensive study of the problem of “forgiving” an event like the Holocaust , see Marla Morris, Curriculum and the holocaust: Competing sites of memory and representation. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001. 179 Notes 4. I spent several class periods wondering aloud what O’Connor (1978) may have meant by designating O.T. and E.T. for two of her characters in “Greenleaf.” The designation seemed important. The students and I played with a number of ideas—old testament/end testament; old time/end time; ordinary time/end time; ordinary time/ everlasting time. We went around and around. Finally, we decided on ordinary time/eschatological time, since both are Christian ideas. Eschatology concerns itself with “end” matters, like death, judgment, the future state; while ordinary time concerns itself with earthly matters. In arriving at that idea, I think we “unearthed” a key component of O’Connor’s religious view. NOTES 180 ...

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