Abstract

Then is the moral that we all require forgiveness and that forgiveness is always a miracle, taking time but beyond time? This can be said, but how can we establish or deliver the weight or gravity of any such answer? Consider the lament with which Elisabeth Young-Bruehl opens her recent Why Arendt Matters: “What do people make of it when, every time some especially appalling, hard-to-fathom mass crime takes place, ‘the banality of evil’ turns up in their morning newspapers or jumps out of the mouths of TV pundits?”2 Well, do people make anything of it at all? Does reading or hearing “the banality of evil” prompt us to stop and think? Or does its “newspeak” use inoculate against that very possibility?.