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Spendthrift mercy: Christianity & the 'psychopathic saint.' (Cover Story)

From: Commonweal  |  Date: 3/25/1994  |  Author: Hux, Samuel

Kenneth Burke used to talk about "perspective by incongruity": cocking one's head a different angle, taking a quirky (even cranky) look at some subject in order to see it anew, relieved of one's normal perspective with its accumulated associations. A kind of phenomenological gambit. I'm going to make some observations about an odd moral ambivalence in the Christian mechanics of mercy: a certain imaginative relation between criminality and grace. This will require a somewhat ...

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