Motivational posters line the hallways en route to the visitation room. Images of rock climbers, an eagle soaring over clouds, a collection of hands of all pigmentation on a basketball, each with an inspirational one-word message: LEADERSHIP, OPPORTUNITY, ACHIEVEMENT, FOCUS, TEAMWORK. Opportunity? Achievement? The irony was almost outrageous. The hallway was in . . .
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The introductory chapter to Priscilla Hayner’s comparative study of truth commissions begins simply and dramatically. The author quotes an exchange with a Rwandan government officer, the sole survivor from his immediate family. One out of seventeen. The occasion for their conversation was a visit to the church at Nyarubuye, a scene of . . .
Read More“Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”… I’ve always liked that phrase, from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Even more so because these days I regularly come across suggestions that the self itself may be nothing but story. “Nothing but” – I must insist – is a far cry from “just” or “merely.” Readers of MR, or any . . .
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