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Autonomy and Mercy
Reflections on Mozart's Operas
Ivan Nagel
Harvard University Press, 1991

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Citizen Critics
Literary Public Spheres
Rosa A. Eberly
University of Illinois Press, 2000

The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the state of our democracy. Classrooms, newspapers, magazines, Internet forums, and many other places grant citizens a place to hold public discourses—and claim a voice on national artistic matters. 

Rosa A. Eberly looks at four censorship controversies where professionals asserted their authority to deny citizen critics a voice—and effectively removed discussion of literature from the public sphere. Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates—and undercut the authority of citizen critics—by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity.

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Hell and the Mercy of God
Adrian J. Reimers
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
If God is truly merciful and loving, perfect in goodness, how can he consign human beings created in his own image to eternal torment in hell? God’s goodness seems incompatible with inflicting horrible evil upon those who oppose his will and defy his law. If to this paradox we add the metaphysical requirement that God be perfect in goodness, the eternal evil of hell seems to be contradictory to God’s own nature.

Catholic philosopher Adrian Reimers takes on these challenges in Hell and the Mercy of God, drawing on relevant sources from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Dante to Tolkien, from Wagner to John Paul II, along with Billie Holliday, The Godfather, and the music of George Gershwin. He presents a philosophical theology, grounded in Scripture, of the nature of goodness and evil, exploring various types of pain, the seven capital sins, the resurrection of the body, the meaning of mammon, the core meaning of idolatry, the psychology of Satan and those who choose his path, and the moral responsibility of the human person.

These reflections illuminate the intelligibility of orthodox Catholic teachings on the goodness of God and the reality of hell. Hell is not an arbitrary imposition set up for human rule-breakers but a continuation of a freely chosen way of life manifest even in this world. Examples from history, art, and contemporary culture lead the author to conclude that anyone who does not believe in the reality of hell is not paying enough attention. And yet, mercy and hope remain triumphant, because, just as Christ off­ers entrance into paradise to the “good thief” Dismas on the cross, God continues to o­ffer repentance and salvation to all who live.
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The Justice of Mercy
Linda Ross Meyer
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"The Justice of Mercy is exhilarating reading. Teeming with intelligence and insight, this study immediately establishes itself as the unequaled philosophical and legal exploration of mercy. But Linda Meyer's book reaches beyond mercy to offer reconceptualizations of justice and punishment themselves. Meyer's ambition is to rethink the failed retributivist paradigm of criminal justice and to replace it with an ideal of merciful punishment grounded in a Heideggerian insight into the gift of being-with-others. The readings of criminal law, Heideggerian and Levinasian philosophy, and literature are powerful and provocative. The Justice of Mercy is a radical and rigorous exploration of both punishment and mercy as profoundly human activities."
---Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, Bard College

"This book addresses a question both ancient and urgently timely: how to reconcile the law's call to justice with the heart's call to mercy? Linda Ross Meyer's answer is both philosophical and pragmatic, taking us from the conceptual roots of the supposed conflict between justice and mercy to concrete examples in both fiction and contemporary criminal law. Energetic, eloquent, and moving, this book's defense of mercy will resonate with philosophers, legal scholars, lawyers, and policymakers engaged with criminal justice, and anyone concerned about our current harshly punitive legal system." 
---Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School

"Far from being a utopian, soft and ineffectual concept, Meyer shows that mercy already operates within the law in ways that we usually do not recognize. . . . Meyer's piercing insights and careful analysis bring the reader to think of law, justice, and mercy itself in a new and far more profound light."
---James Martel, San Francisco State University

How can granting mercy be just if it gives a criminal less punishment than he "deserves" and treats his case differently from others like it? This ancient question has become central to debates over truth and reconciliation commissions, alternative dispute resolution, and other new forms of restorative justice. The traditional response has been to marginalize mercy and to cast doubt on its ability to coexist with forms of legal justice.

Flipping the relationship between justice and mercy, Linda Ross Meyer argues that our rule-bound and harsh system of punishment is deeply flawed and that mercy should be, not the crazy woman in the attic of the law, but the lady of the house. This book articulates a theory of punishment with mercy and illustrates the implications of that theory with legal examples drawn from criminal law doctrine, pardons, mercy in military justice, and fictional narratives of punishment and mercy.

Linda Ross Meyer is Carmen Tortora Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law; President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities; and Associate Editor of Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Jacket illustration: "Lotus" by Anthony James
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Mantle of Mercy
Islamic Chaplaincy in North America
Muhammad A. Ali
Templeton Press, 2022
This engaging collection presents thirty essays by Muslim chaplains reflecting on their experiences as spiritual caregivers. Through their first-hand accounts, they impart how they skillfully apply the mercy and compassion of the Prophet Muhammad to the people in their care. They also share how their faith informs their service, how they navigate the obstacles of a predominantly Christian profession, and how they administer to the spiritual needs of people of different faiths or of no faith at all.

Working in a variety of settings—including hospitals, prisons, universities, and the armed forces—Muslim chaplains encounter unique challenges on a daily basis, requiring them to call upon the resources of their Islamic faith with wisdom and tenderness.  The contributors to this volume explore these circumstances vividly and honestly. Their personal stories are instructive of how Islamic principles can be employed with spiritual insight to bring strength and comfort to the sick and suffering.  
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The Mercy of Eternity
A Memoir of Depression and Grace
Eric G. Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2010
In his best-selling book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Eric G. Wilson challenged our culture’s blindly insistent pursuit of happiness at all costs. In his harrowing yet ultimately hopeful memoir, The Mercy of Eternity, the author turns an unsparing eye on his own continuing struggle with bipolar depression and finds, within the very illness that causes so much suffering, the resources for hope, forgiveness, and love.

As a bright student-athlete on his way to West Point, Eric Wilson seemed to be well on the way to a fulfilling life. Yet he was haunted by overwhelming feelings of his deep insignificance. As he grew older, the traditional means of fulfillment—marriage and professional success—did nothing to assuage the descents into darkness and destructive behavior. Therapy and medication have offered some relief, but the birth of his daughter ultimately forces his hand. In some ways, the answer has been in front of him the whole time, for English professor Wilson finds in the literature of Coleridge, Blake, and others the lessons that depression might teach. When he comes upon “negative theology”—the school of thought that finds God in the “dark night of the soul”—Wilson discovers the framework for a radical call to forgive depression. 

Only by forgiving this capricious, impersonal force is Wilson able to find the grace to move beyond the cycles of destructive self-absorption.Wilson admits that he continues to struggle, but in facing his depression instead of trying to escape it, he finds wisdom and grace.

Beautifully and accessibly written, The Mercy of Eternity is a brief yet profound meditation on the largest question of life.
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The Path of Mercy
The Life of Catherine McAuley
Mary C. Sullivan
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Breaking new ground in presenting the life of Catherine McAuley (1778?-1841), the Dublin woman who founded the Sisters of Mercy, Mary C. Sullivan has written the first full-length, documented narrative of McAuley in more than fifty years.
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Republic of Mercy
Poems
Sharon Wang
Tupelo Press, 2018
In Sharon Wang’s thrilling and corporeal geometry, touch dominates, if often in its ‘aftermarks’: singes, whiffs, folds of fabric, echoing gestures between bodies. With generous language and quicksilver intelligence, Wang expresses ‘a hunger so large it stops the mouth.’ Her poems describe what is ‘hard and brilliant,’ the spaces between objects, and what’s left in the wake of losses. “Despite its attunement both to elegy and to witness, the mode is praise: ‘He loved the world. He loved it suddenly / and without reason.’ . . . As the poet works to understand, ‘If in fact it wasn’t possible to build / the world anew,’ she does build––extravagantly, judiciously, lovingly. The result is a book of radiant integrity.” — from the judges’ citation for the Kundiman Poetry Prize.
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