학술논문

Bearing Witness: Hope for the Unseen.
Document Type
Essay
Author
Source
Political Theology. Mar2016, Vol. 17 Issue 2, p137-150. 14p.
Subject
*TRUTH commissions
*WITNESSES
*ETHICS
*AMBIVALENCE
*HOPE
Language
ISSN
1462-317X
Abstract
Beginning with an identification of the ethical and political ambivalence surrounding hope, this essay considers whether an analysis of the activity of bearing witness to truth could offer a theoretical framework for thinking about hope differently. Specifically it argues that hope can be taken as a discipline, or practice, one which is both required for, and enacted in, the act of bearing witness. Through a consideration of the process of bearing witness in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions responding to national and intergenerational trauma, the essay explores the way in which bearing witness is a fundamentally hopeful action in so far as it ceaselessly seeks to speak to the truth of an event while acknowledging the inability to ever fully capture that event in words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]