Double Vision

Who do you see?  A beautiful young woman, or a not-so-beautiful, old woman?

"Double Vision"

"Oppression and Justice"

(Chapter V of Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf)

"Conflicting parties need to practice what Hannah Arendt calls an 'enlarged way of thinking'"... (p. 212)

"or, as I will call it 'double vision'... we enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspectives.  Nothing can guarantee in advance that the perspectives will ultimately merge and agreement be reached.  We may find that we must reject the perspective of the other.  Yet we should seek to see things from their perspective in the hope that competing justices may become converging justices and eventually issue in agreement." (p. 213)

"Stricken with the sense of sinfulness, should we withdraw from making judgments and working for justice? Abdication of responsibility will be tempting to those who only know how to live in a world neatly divided into territories of pure light and of utter darkness.  But no such world exists, except in the imagination of the self-righteous; the construction of such a world is itself an act of injustice.  In a world shot through with injustice, the struggle for justice must be carried on by people inescapably tainted by injustice. Hence the importance of 'double vision.' We need to see our judgments about justice and our struggle against injustice through the eyes of the other--even the manifestly 'unjust other'--and be willing to readjust our understanding of justice and repent of acts of injustice." (p. 218)