Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...despite every indignity and scoff, forgiveness does not just endure but thrives. As Mitchell Wright instinctively realized, there is not only a religious impetus to forgive but also therapeutic, social and practical reasons to do so. This applies to victims of crimes as well as to those who must deal with the slings and arrows of more common misfortunes--unfaithfulness, betrayal, ungratefulness and mere insult. In the past two years, scientists and sociologists have begun to extract forgiveness and the act of forgiving from the confines of the confessional, transforming it into the subject of quantifiable research. In one case...
...banishing depression. Just a few years ago, says Robert Enright, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin and a pioneer in the scientific study of forgiveness, most secularly inclined intellectuals "trashed it; they said, 'Only wimps forgive.'" But now, Enright says, "psychiatrists, M.D.s, scientists, lawyers, ministers and social workers can all be on the same page. We are really on a roll...
...reconciliation may be viewed as the refinement of mechanisms reaching back not some 2,000 years but 25 million. "Instead of looking at conflict resolution as uniquely ours," he says, "we are showing that it exists in many cooperative species," particularly chimpanzees. De Waal's work focuses on the "social memories" of primates, and he says, "We have full confidence that they have memories of fights, hold grudges--and make up when necessary." While such behavior is not synonymous with forgiveness, says De Waal "it's hard to imagine it's not related...
Forgiveness has even wider social applications. An unusual coalition of liberal lawyers and religious thinkers has pioneered something called the restorative justice movement, whose favored instrument is conferences between crime victims and jailed perpetrators. There are now more than 300 such programs in prisons country-wide, including a $1 million religion-based juvenile-justice initiative in Florida...
While restorative justice has roots in Christianity, its payoff is political and psychological. The conferences give victims the chance to confront criminals with the heartbreak they caused. The meetings' end goals, however, are rehabilitation and social engineering: they rehearse the prospect of a whole community once the prisoner is released back into society. Forgiveness is not a conference "agenda item," says Bruce Kittle, a Wisconsin pastor and clinical professor who consults on the state's restorative justice programs, but "we talk about it with victims beforehand. Particularly in violent cases, it sometimes has a more direct role." Says Walter Dickey...