However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham’s unque… - Susan Neiman

It took Germans some time to learn this after the second world war, but they finally invented a concept for it: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates as "working off the past". Now Berlin has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism. By choosing to remember what its soldiers once did, Germany made a choice about the values it wants to reject. Other choices, such as erecting glass walls in government buildings, reflect the values it wants to maintain: democracy should be transparent. The rebuilding of Berlin – a long, discursive process in which historians, politicians and citizens debated for more than a decade – was aspirational. No one, least of all a German, would claim the rebuilding and renaming of Berlin’s landscape eradicated the roots of racism. The city’s public space represents conscious decisions about what values the reunited republic ought to hold.

I’m delighted to hear someone make the claim that there is moral progress because it can be such a incendiary thing to say, and its something that I say and deeply believe in.

How do we remember the parts of our histories we'd rather forget? Repression and revision are always options.