The University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, directed by James Hunter, recently hosted a symposium on justice, centering on Nicholas Wolterstorff's book Justice: Rights and Wrongs, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. This is a project Wolterstorff has been working on for some time, and indeed it has grown to such proportions as to require a second volume (touching on the relationship between justice and love), also coming in due course from Princeton.

To respond to Wolterstorff's book, the institute assembled a stellar lineup of participants: Charles Reid, Russell Hittinger, Sarah Coakley, Miroslav Volf, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bernstein, Christopher Eberle, and Paul Weithman. (I had to leave before the last three gave their formal responses, but all three had participated in the free-flowing conversation that followed each response.) The standard of discussion was very high, with a range of views represented—including some strong dissent—and universal respect for the scope of Wolterstorff's work and his patient explication of the issues at stake.

In some respects, this preoccupation with justice has been a lifetime project for Wolterstorff, and to provide some context for the symposium, I want to step back for a bit and quote from a column I wrote for the January/February 2000 issue of Books & Culture, called "No Justice, No Peace." (Forgive me for quoting myself, but it seems the most efficient method here. The online content is restricted, and seven years is a long time, even for the doughty readers of B&C. Anyone who saw the column at the time is likely to have forgotten it by now.) So here we begin the flashback to year 2000:

In this space two issues ago ["Thou Shalt Not Take Cheap Shots," September/October 1999] I wrote about what might be called "rules of engagement" for argument, drawing on an essay by the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff ("Tertullian's Enduring Question," The Cresset, Trinity [June/July] 1999). Here I want to continue on that theme, focusing on a particular kind of argument that is pervasive in American society today. In arguments of this type, there is a claim of injustice and a demand that it be redressed. For example—though readers who have not been in hibernation for the last decade could supply their own examples—in the Chicago Tribune of November 29, 1999, columnist Salim Muwakkil advocated the payment of reparations by the U.S. government to the descendants of slaves. The next day, the front page of the Tribune featured a story about survivors of the siege of Leningrad during World War II, who are now calling for reparations. "People talk so much about survivors of the Nazis," says Bella Zaltsman, a "Leningrad survivor" now living in Chicago. "And in this, we are not included? Is that justice?"

Of course, these examples represent only one subset of the many varieties of such claims. Recently I was told that Wheaton College (where, I am delighted to say, my daughter began her studies last fall) is under pressure to change its admissions policies. Unlike many colleges (see "Colleges Look for Ways to Reverse a Decline in Enrollment by Men," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 1999), Wheaton has maintained a more or less even balance between men and women. But because far more women than men apply to Wheaton, the admissions bar for women is set much higher. (Many young men enrolled at Wheaton, it could be said, are the beneficiaries of "affirmative action.") To some of the parents of young women denied admission—and no doubt to some of the applicants themselves—this seems a clear injustice.

There's no point in enumerating further examples. What's urgently needed, it seems to me, is a calculated stepping back to reflect on how we think and talk about justice. Ah, more talk! More academic conferences, more dreary, abstruse papers collected in volumes that no one will open. Yes, that's precisely what the doctor ordered. So some cynic will observe, not entirely without cause. (Cynicism is rarely baseless!) But in answer, we need only point to works such as Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace, where the discourse of justice is examined via theological insight, biblical exegesis, and the particularities of current conflicts. What matters is the quality of the talk.

So this column is first and foremost a "call for papers," for essays on "justice talk." They may be primarily philosophical or theological or sociological, they may be informed by literature or law or psychology, they may be very broad in their sweep or narrowly focused. They should be readable—readable by civilians—and should not exceed 5000 words.

In the meantime, to get the ball rolling, I will again take some words from Nicholas Wolterstorff as a point of departure. The text is a newspaper report (The Grand Rapids Press, November 13, 1999) of a lecture, "Is There a Place for Justice in Christian Education?", given by Wolterstorff as the inaugural speaker in Calvin College's Beversluis Forum. "Securing social justice," the newspaper article begins, "means there must be a strong emphasis on listening—especially to those on the lower rungs of society, according to Yale University Divinity School Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff."

Here there's a clear continuity with the ethics of argument sketched by Wolterstorff in the essay cited above. As the newspaper report tells us, "Asked by sophomore social work student, Joel Filmore, 29, of Chicago, how he reconciled or explained instances of racial prejudice within the Calvin community, Wolterstorff said he considered such incidents a failure. Filmore, a bi-racial student, told Wolterstorff he has experienced a surprising amount of racial prejudice among the college's students."

"In general, the answer to what you have said is to call it by its name," Wolterstorff told Filmore. "Recognize it as a failure and then ask what we can do about it."

What the story doesn't report is that Wolterstorff also issued a very important caveat: perceived injustice is not necessarily real injustice.

"One of the few subjects on which we all seem to agree," writes Thomas Sowell in his new book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice (Free Press, 214 pp.; $25), "is the need for justice. But our agreement is only seeming because we mean such different things by the same word." What the claimants who survived the Leningrad siege want is nothing more or less than recompense for "the undeserved misfortunes arising from the cosmos." Such "cosmic justice" will never be attainable in this world.

All right, end of flashback: we're now in 2007 again. You'll have noticed that this ancient column included a "call for papers," standard fare for academic journals but a rarity indeed for B&C. Interestingly enough, the response was minimal. While I continued, c. 2000, to receive dozens of proposals for essays and reviews on the Religious Right, postmodernism, and Quentin Tarantino, there were very few responses to the call for essays on "justice talk."

How to reconcile this with the pervasiveness of "justice talk" in our society? One answer may be that the way I framed the column gave the (mistaken) impression that I was asking primarily for pieces that would tear into self-described victims. But another possibility is that—as Wolterstorff suggested in his talk the first night of the symposium—people nowadays are reluctant to talk explicitly about justice, except perhaps when claiming that they are victims of an injustice.

There's an enormous distance between this question—and the matters taken up in the column just quoted—and the fine-grained symposium responses to Wolterstorff's argument about justice. And yet despite the distance, the two conversations are connected. I want to take up this subject again in this space next week, with some attention to the way that people are talking about justice today, people as various as the theologian David Kelsey (in his book Imagining Redemption), the contributors to a recent manifesto of sorts from the "new monastic communities," and a historian who has studied the ecclesiastical administration of justice in the age of Augustine.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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