A principle that restorative justice must protect the harmer's and harmed's right to question, doubt, and deviate from prescribed narratives and doctrines during processes.
Sor Juana refused to accept institutional orthodoxy; her willingness to ask forbidden questions and pursue heretical knowledge became her moral power. Restorative justice processes often impose their own orthodoxies—prescribed apologies, standardized outcomes, doctrinal narratives of healing. Sor Juana's legacy insists that true accountability requires space for heretical thought: uncomfortable questions, unfamiliar perspectives, intellectual resistance. Both harmed and harmer must be free to express doubt about proposed solutions, to question the process itself, to pursue understanding that authorities deem unorthodox. This protects against co-optation of restorative justice into new forms of control. It means restorative facilitators must tolerate dissent, welcome intellectual challenge, and allow emergence of unpredictable truths. Justice rooted in Sor Juana's tradition refuses easy closure; it embraces the messy, questioning, sometimes heretical work of genuine transformation.
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