Generous forgiveness

Nicholas Wolterstorff doesn't dumb anything down. He insists on closely reasoned, carefully parsed argument. He refuses facile writing and glib statements that might make the argument easy. He does careful, demanding work on every page and insists that the reader travel along, doing equally hard work.

Of late the hard work done by Wolterstorff concerns questions of justice; preceding Justice in Love was his book Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Propelled to questions of justice by his encounter with apartheid in South Africa and with the suffering of the Palestinians, Wolterstorff pushes back to metaquestions, and by the time he finishes, the issues have been radically reframed.

In Justice in Love, Wolterstorff takes up the question of the relationship between agape love and justice. He arrives at that question via a quick but firm rejection of egoism, eudaemonism and utilitarianism as inadequate ways to think about the practice of well-being. The problem in each case is that self-interest and self-promotion cloud the capacity to commit to the other and that each approach seeks a universal formulation of practice that does not focus on the specific subject at hand.