My Top Five Books On Forgiveness
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Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace Miroslav Volf (Zondervan) |
When it comes to contemplating forgiveness, Volf’s works stand head and shoulders above the crowd. Here he puts forgiveness into the larger context of the generosity of God and the generosity that God, in turn, desires of us.
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Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace L. Gregory Jones and Célestin Musekura (InterVarsity Press) |
Musekura’s first-hand experiences in post-genocide Rwanda and Jones’s theologically rich insights create a thought-provoking and practical guide. Notable themes include community, truth-telling, and the burden of memory.
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God and the Victim: Theological Reflections on Evil, Victimization, Justice, and Forgiveness Edited by Lisa Barnes Lampman (Eerdmans) |
I own two copies of this collection of essays from theologians, experts, and practitioners since my first is unreadable from all the underlining. Unlike so many examples of mere exhortation to forgive, this book breathes with compassion for victims.
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Helping People Forgive David W. Augsburger (Westminster John Knox Press) |
This book should be in the hands of all clergy and counselors who grapple with how to encourage others to forgive. The discussion on moving toward mature reconciliation is more than worth the price.
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Five Steps to Forgiveness: The Art and Science of Forgiveness Everett Worthington (Crown) |
Worthington, one of the world’s experts on forgiveness, gives a straightforward self-help guide. His depth of clinical research is matched only by his personal experience of wrestling with forgiving those who murdered his elderly mother.
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I have been sincerely trying to forgive certain people for the past twenty years-with no breakthroughs yet.’Spiritual’ people tend to blame the victims in the event of absence of breakthroughs.This factor needs to be taken into due account by the readers of such literature.Some of us need to live with the fact of unhealed memories.We need creative ways of living with such facts.It is not simply our efforts to forgive which bring breakthroughs=the Universe has to lend a helping hand too.We need to be charitable towards those people,who have not been lent such a helping hand.