Failures of forgiveness : what we get wrong and how to do better

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Forgiveness and magical thinking 1. What to expect when you are expecting forgiveness 2. Forgivers and withholders 3. Making a good ask 4. Forgiveness as political project 5. When race matters 6. Home improvement 7. The business of forgiveness 8. Canceling versus forgiving 9. Forgiving yourself 10. Radical repair: With or without forgiveness

"The conventional view from Cicero to Oprah Winfrey is that forgiveness is the letting go of negative feelings and behavior, which aims at reconciliation, and perhaps is the only means to a better future. Forgiveness, on this view, is what the mature extend and the bitter hold back. Promoting it is a virtue, and discouraging it is a vice. But if this is how we think about forgiveness, philosopher Myisha Cherry argues, we could not be more wrong. And as a result, we may be less likely to mend our wounds. Even worse, we may perpetuate harm in the world-as we aim to do the opposite. The Failures of Forgiveness is her attempt to change our personal and social relationships with forgiveness for the better. There is, she will show, a different-philosophically grounded and psychologically supported-way of thinking and talking about it. Only with this, she argues might we have a chance at recovery from wrongdoing, growth from healing, or a renewed sense of trust and hope, or what she calls "moral repair." In the first half of the book, she aims to show how the current or "narrow view" of forgiveness is wrong and, even counter-productive, and how a more expansive view of forgiveness can improve our roles as forgivers, withholders, and requestors in ways that make moral repair more likely. Likewise, she shows how the common, narrow view can negatively impact us in these roles. She will show how forgiveness is not reducible to a simple formula and the range of options of how we forgive and under what conditions is much broader than we think (e.g that we can forgive and still be angry). In the second half, she uses the new framework to show how forgiveness functions at home, at work, and in the wider world. She explores our private lives and examines the philosophical and social factors that influence our own unreasonable expectations of forgiveness-who we expect to give it, when, and why. In doing so, she plans to take readers into courtrooms and truth commissions to examine what often goes wrong in a "forgiveness culture" she thinks is still prevalent today. She examines press conferences in the aftermath of police violence to talk about how we disrespect victims when we rush to publicly inquire about reconciliation. She'll challenge the ways in which we criticize those who forgive in some cases, and those who refuse to forgive in others. In the end, her aim is to give readers a better understanding of their own relationship with forgiveness-when they are willing to offer or ask for it; when they are not; and why. They will also be able to use it more wisely-for repair-while accepting what it cannot do"--