Loading…

Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice is unavailable, but you can change that!

Two parables that have become firmly lodged in popular consciousness and affection are the parable of the Good Samaritan and the parable of the Prodigal Son. These simple but subversive tales have historically had a significant impact on shaping the spiritual, aesthetic, moral, and legal traditions of Western civilization, and their capacity to inform debate on a wide range of moral and social...

well as someone who represents the demands of law and justice,40 while the older brother is expressly depicted as an industrious and law-abiding member of the household community who is outraged at his father’s judicial leniency. The interaction of these three characters is strongly conditioned by their differing reactions to an episode of willful and harmful offending, and, as Scott notes, “in describing the father-son relation, the story borrows heavily from a legal repertoire.”41 This leads to
Page 193