Ideas about Forgiveness

You can explore:

• You can learn more from the Dharma Wisdom website and the Buddha Net website, which explores love and forgiveness meditations.
• Atonement for breaking a covenant at Judaism 101—Yom Kippur Day of Atonement .
• A variety of perspectives at Why Forgive?

A 2004 essay by Episcopal priest L. William Countryman, "Forgiveness and Justice," challenges the idea of retribution as justice and presents an alternate view. The essay reads, in part:

Justice seeks the world of "shalom," the life of the age to come. It will do nothing that would make such a world impossible. It will do anything that might actually bring it closer. It will even forgive. Instead of dedicating ourselves, then, to the impossible task of getting the past right, we find ourselves freed by forgiveness to live fully in the present and to begin building something new and better.