Vengeance is Not Ours, It's God's

ABSTRACT: In this paper I explore Psalm 137 (one of the so called Imprecatory Psalms) and how it is to be understood and applied within the Christian canon and applied to the Christian church despite its violent imagery.

Revista Albertus Magnus, 2017

In times of crisis and conflict, when injustice and impunity cast a pall over the land, Christians can experience a common feeling: the wish that God intervene in history and bring justice, which does not seem to come through human efforts alone. However, this longing for justice can hide a certain desire for revenge. That is the feeling of the slaughtered people of Revelation 6:10 who cry out to God for revenge. This article proposes, from the analysis of the biblical book, that the way that God responds to the victims' clamor of vengeance is not by attacking the oppressors but by wiping away the tears of the oppressed, giving them consolation and comfort. From the point of view of the relationship between orthopraxis and orthodoxy, it implies that, by the ecclesial community, assume as a first response this way of God's acting, that is to say, to offer effective comfort and relief to victims.

2017

Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2010

Priscilla Papers, 2021

Author: Spencer Miles Boersma Publisher: CBE International Psalm 137 models for us prayer that can lead away from vengeance and toward forgiveness.

2017

we will see dealt with, albeit in a different manner, in his "academically philosophic" writings. In memoir 11, he refers to the incident of being expelled from school. He says: …I am addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as witness, without yet knowing what these sublime words mean, and this grammar, and to, and witness, and God and take, take God, and not only do I pray, as I have never stopped doing all my life, and pray to him, but I take him here, and take him as my witness, I give myself what he gives me, i.e., the i.e. to take the time to take God as a witness to ask him … why I talk to him in Christian Latin French when they expelled me from the Lycèe de Ben Aknoun in 1942 a little black and a very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, and to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason… 4 As I am sitting here, in this one-room studio by the beach in Sinai, the land of hospitality 5 , news of two bombs detonating in two churches on Palm Sunday 6 , one in Tanta (where one of my current students, a Christian, comes from) and another in Alexandria, my hometown, reach me. Forty-five people, Christians, Copts, Egyptians are dead. Fearing for my student, I email his classmates asking them for news of him; thankfully, he is fine; physically fine, that is to say. A few days ago, I walked into my early morning class after having viewed the images of a Syrian father, closely holding the bodies of his two children; they had died because of chemical bomb attacks on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun. As I was looking at the youthful faces of my students, I questioned what one teaches on days like this; what methodology would enable me to "roll the … overwhelming question", "squeeze[] the universe into a ball" 7. "How are your essays coming along?" I need to say. The movie Yume (Dreams) 8 by Kurasawa, depicts his "real" dreams throughout his life. In the dream "The Weeping Demon", we see a man, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, as if returning from work, roaming in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic wilderness. He meets a demon who claims to have once been a man, but a war, a nuclear war, destroyed plants and animals and caused men to grow horns. The horns are very painful; they cause them to hit their heads against the ground, the walls, all night. 4 ibid, p. 56 5 In "A Word of Welcome" Derrida makes a reference to the section on "Hospitality" in Totality and Infinity, in which Levinas identifies Sinai as the land of hospitality; hospitality being associated with the feminine. Derrida, Jacques. "A word of Welcome" Adieu Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Stanford: California. 1999, p. 66. 6 Palm Sunday marks the first day of the Holy week, the last week of Lent, celebrated in all Christendom. In Egypt, Palm Sunday is a day when Coptic Christians go to church to mark the day. 7 Quotes are from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. 8 Yume, (Dreams) by Akira Kurasawa (1990)

Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs Vol 15, 2015

In 1997, the Japanese writer of Okinawan descent Medoruma Shun was awarded the Akutagawa prize for his story Droplets (Suiteki). In this tale, Tokushô, a veteran of the Battle of Okinawa, wakes up one day to find his leg turned into a gourd melon. His toe bursts, and water slowly comes out of it. Every night Tokushô is visited by the ghosts of his war comrades, who take turns and sit down to drink from his appendage. Tokushô is now forced to revisit those memories of the war he had been repressing for over forty years. This paper studies how Droplets functions as a work on personal trauma and on collective memory. Trauma and collective memory are addressed from two parallel perspectives: the narrative and the metanarrative. On the one hand, the story of Tokushô involves traumatic experiences and war memories in postwar Japan. On the other hand, this paper argues that Medoruma constructs his short story using particular devices to engage with the problematic issue of representing traumatic experiences and discussing war memories in postwar Japan. Specifically, these devices include fantastic elements to represent trauma and the use of culturally symbolic and referential to discuss war memory narratives in Japan.

Peace Review, 2010

2011

Essays in Philosophy, 2003

A 'respect for person' ethic is the secular perspective adopted by Govier in this sincere, but often disappointing book. It contains a preface, an appendix on religious traditions on forgiveness (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism), an appendix on respect for persons as an ethical foundation, notes, a bibliography, an index, and eight chapters. Her thesis is stated in the preface: that seeking revenge is objectionable for both practical and moral reasons; that the desire for revenge is not deeply "natural" in the sense of being an elemental, culturally independent feature of human nature; and that even if revenge were to be natural in that way, such naturalness would not constitute a moral argument in its favor. (viii) Govier conceives of forgiveness as "a process of overcoming attitudes of resentment and anger that may persist when one has been injured by wrongdoing" (viii). She offers an account of bilateral, unilateral, and mutual forgiveness. Her work has pronounced political import in that she argues that attitudes and dispositions can be attributed to groups, that groups can suffer harm, and that groups can be responsible agents of wrongdoing. As a consequence, Govier contends that groups can forgive. Her method is to employ a host of examples taken from recent (World War II and after) history, sprinkle in a few invented examples, and lay out long-winded and typically repetitive arguments. The result is an occasionally provocative and often overly one-sided treatment punctuated by earnestness.