In Original Forgiveness, Nicolas de Warren challenges the widespread assumption that forgiveness is always a response to something that has incited it. Rather than considering forgiveness exclusively in terms of an encounter between individuals or groups after injury, he argues that availability for the possibility of forgiveness represents an original forgiveness, an essential condition for the prospect of human relations. De Warren develops this notion of original forgiveness through a reflection on the indispensability of trust for human existence, as well as an examination of the refusal or unavailability to forgive in the aftermath of moral harms. De Warren engages in a critical discussion of philosophical figures, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edmund Husserl, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Améry, and of literary works by William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Simon Wiesenthal, Herman Melville, and Maurice Sendak. He uses this discussion to show that in trusting another person, we must trust in ourselves to remain available to the possibility of forgiveness for those occasions when the other person betrays a trust, without thereby forgiving anything in advance. Original forgiveness is to remain the other person’s keeper—even when the other has caused harm. Likewise, being another’s keeper calls upon an original beseeching for forgiveness, given the inevitable possibility of blemish or betrayal.

"Rather than considering forgiveness exclusively in terms of an encounter between individuals or groups after injury, this book argues that availability for the possibility of forgiveness represents an original forgiveness, an indispensable condition for the prospect of human relations"--

Gary Inrig brings wonderful breadth, depth, and balance to a very difficult subject: forgiveness. As one 83-year-old theologian, Rev. Herb VanderLugt, says, "This is the best book on the subject I have ever read." Whether it's living forgiven, learning to forgive, what to do when an offender refuses to request forgiveness, whether we're asking, giving, or waiting for forgiveness, this book covers the subject with Inrig's on-the-mark illustrations and solid biblical teaching. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the subject of forgiveness to the Christian faith. If the Bible makes it clear that Christians are forgiven people, it also makes it clear that we are to be forgiving people. How and when do we do that? What does it look like?

No one can avoid conflict, sin, and evil, or the hurt and brokenness they cause. The best way to transform conflict and hurt from being life-destructive to being life-constructive is to forgive and to be forgiven. Authentic, biblically based forgiveness is a gift that God offers to humanity so that hurt can be healed, the cycle of retaliation broken, a painful past soothed, and estranged relationships reconciled and restored. Dr John Tran explains how forgiveness in both Western and Chinese cultures differs from the practice outlined in God’s word. Authentic Forgiveness calls us to examine our own cultural traditions and points us towards the search for true reconciliation, where people risk to communicate, extend trust, and work through anger and pain. Combining biblical and theological understanding with practical strategies for local church ministry, Tran offers an inspiring paradigm of action for Christians in urban Asian contexts and beyond.

Why is revenge such a pervasive and destructive problem? How can we create a future in which revenge is less common and forgiveness is more common? Psychologist Michael McCullough argues that the key to a more forgiving, less vengeful world is to understand the evolutionary forces that gave rise to these intimately human instincts and the social forces that activate them in human minds today. Drawing on exciting breakthroughs from the social and biological sciences, McCullough dispenses surprising and practical advice for making the world a more forgiving place. Michael E. McCullough (Miami, Florida), an internationally recognized expert on forgiveness and revenge, is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he directs the Laboratory for Social and Clinical Psychology.

A narrative--part journal, part memoir, part social analysis--of how the author decided, in mid-life, to stop hating white America.

In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures. It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology, remorse, and a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law, politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it to earth and make it a human trait.