Full Description
This book examines the iconic presence of second chances in everyday life. David Newman explores its various iterations in popular culture, commercial marketplaces, religion, intimate relationships, education, criminal justice, and human bodies. He analyzes how this concept—as a cultural aspiration, driver of policy, and lived personal experience—has become part and parcel of our individual sense of self and our collective national identity. While the rhetoric of redemption is familiar and ubiquitous, Newman uncovers the costs and constraints of second chances, paying particular attention to the factors that affect judgments of deservedness.
Informed by an array of data sources including personal interviews, mission statements of nonprofit recovery agencies, images in popular culture, stories from the news, plot summaries of novels, and scriptural texts, Newman frames the second chance experience as the quintessential cultural paradox: a concept that simultaneously represents the pinnacle of our shared hopes for renewal and our deepest suspicions about the intransigence of human nature.
Contents
Chapter 1: The Ubiquitous Second Chance
Chapter 2: A Theory of Second Chances
Chapter 3: The Spiritual Second Chance
Chapter 4: The Post-Criminal Second Chance
Chapter 5: The Intimate Second Chance
Chapter 6: The Bodily Second Chance
Chapter 7: The Educational Second Chance
Chapter 8: The Cultural and Commercial Second Chance
Chapter 9: No Second Chance
Chapter 10: The Elusive Second Chance: A Right or a Privilege?
