Telling Truth to Kings

What is the meaning of money? What is success? How should we pursue happiness? How much is enough?

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the Russian writer and social reformer, famous for writing the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Born to a noble, landed family, his early years were marked by a dissolute life and a violent reaction to the horrors of the Crimean War. In 1862 he married and settled down, producing thirteen children and a burst of literary successes. But after writing Anna Karenina he experienced a profound spiritual crisis and renounced his literary ambitions, believing them to be incompatible with his deepest convictions. His numerous later works were on religious and moral subjects.

How Much Land Does a Man Need?, written in 1886, and translated from the Russian by Louise and Aylmer Maude, is from this later period.
It is an enduring story that reveals the sometimes insidious and sometimes overt destructiveness of greed and challenges us to question our own self-awareness.

“The Lottery,” Jackson’s famous short story, has fascinated readers for years with its unexpected and chilling ending. Included with the story of a troubling but powerful modern essay, “The Lottery Revisited” by Kay Haugaard, which is about her  experiences in teaching this story though the years and her students’ increasing acceptance of the unthinkable. Together they raise hard questions about subjectivity and truth in a free society.

A Jewish concentration camp inmate is pulled from work detail at a makeshift hospital to listen to a dying Nazi soldier’s confession. The soldier asks him for forgiveness that he might die in peace. In the Jew’s place, what would you have done?

In this Reading with a Foreword by Os Guinness, Simon Wiesenthal gives his account of this incident that happened in Poland during World War II, challenging readers with the moral question of forgiveness. If a murderer is truly repentant, should he be forgiven? Are some actions too horrible to forgive? Can you forgive someone for something done to someone else? Or can you forgive, as a member of a larger community?

These tough questions are relevant for us today. As Os Guinness points out in the foreword, forgiveness is tricky business and should not be taken for granted or issued flippantly. Forgiveness too quickly given can easily become cheap grace, somehow dismissing the wounds of the inflicted or justifying the behavior of the wrongdoer. True forgiveness is costly, where the wronged relinquishes the right for retribution. And yet, through forgiveness, both the wronged and the wrongdoer find release, freedom, and the power to move on.

In an age of increasing violence and political unrest throughout the world, the issue of forgiveness is one that modern people need to consider and better understand.

A new Preface by award-winning director Laura Waters Hinson helps connect this theme with present-day post-genocide Rwanda and other situations.