Suffering Witness Focus of Conference Session 

SALISBURY, MD---Salisbury University’s Dr. James D. Hatley hoped to give students a better understanding of the agonizing issues and painful lessons of the Holocaust when he published his book Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable last year.

This year, Hatley discovered that he, too, could learn more from his book, thanks to a session that focused on the book at this fall’s annual conference of the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy, held in Baltimore. Two fellow scholars, Dr. Sylvia Benso of Siena University and Dr. Cynthia Coe of Monmouth University, read and responded to the book with essays, which were read during the session along with Hatley’s own response. A lively question-and-answer session followed.

“A lot of interesting questions were raised that will help me,” said Hatley, an associate professor in the Philosophy Department since 1990. There were questions on forgiveness, repentance, giving witness and responses to evil. The session continued a learning process that began to take shape when he put the book’s first words on the page. “I think writing a book, making the sustained effort for reflection that delving deeply into a topic for a book requires, is important for a teacher.”

Suffering Witness,  published by SUNY Press, grew out of a course Hatley taught on the Holocaust in the mid-’90s. Faced with a spiritually daunting subject, he needed to help his students understand why they should open their hearts and imaginations to an event of such overwhelming cruelty and despair. He also wanted to ensure that in revisiting the lessons of the Holocaust, he did not fall into the trap of glossing over the suffering of the victims and the inhumanity of the perpetrators to make the topic more palatable to his students. Through the book, he wanted to help people understand why we should look back to study the Holocaust, and explore what lessons it holds for today.

“Sometimes philosophy can be very abstract. This particular work, while it has its abstract moments, is focused on a particular event and human responses to that event,” Hatley said. “What it involves to remember the Holocaust is always a very thorny issue, and it calls out deep parts of the human soul, and has larger implications to our daily lives.”

The Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy is the second-largest philosophical society in the country. Each year, from among all current philosophy books, it chooses just eight books for peer review and discussion at its conference.

“It was really humbling,” said Hatley. “You write for a long time, and you wonder if someone will ever read it at all, so to have these other scholars read it and respond with long essays--and others join in the discussion--was wonderful.”