The editors of SkyLight Paths have provided us with an invaluable moral service by assembling this serious, sobering, and multidimensional survey of forgiveness as a "journey to freedom, healing, and peace." They have divided the paperback into eight richly developed sections:

1. Understanding Forgiveness
2. Letting Go
3. Reconciliation and Forgiveness in Relationships
4. Forgiveness and the Divine
5. Accepting Forgiveness
6. Love Your Enemies
7. Forgiveness, Justice and Peace
8. Cultivating a Forgiving Heart

Among the more than 50 contributors are clergy, spiritual directors, and retreat leaders from a variety of traditions including William Cleary, Kent Ira Groff, Ron Miller, John Philip Newell, Basil Pennington, Jan Phillips, Imam Jamal Rahman, Donna Schaper, Rami Shapiro, Jane Vennard, and many others.

Here are a few quotations to whet your interest in this superb overview of the spiritual practice of forgiveness.

• "Genuine forgiveness should be reserved for those who really hurt us. Forgiveness is for the deep and searing pain that involves betrayal, disloyalty, or even brutality."
— Rabbi Edwin Goldberg

• "Forgiveness is like a bridge you seem to cross over and over again. With every crossing, you discover that there is more."
— Karyn D. Kedar

• "The root meaning of the verb 'to forgive' is 'to let go, to give back, to cease to harbor.' Looked at this way, forgiveness is a restful activity. Far more work is required to cling to a judgment than to let go of it."
— Hugh Prather

• "Forgiveness keeps us from being stuck in the past and helps us find a way beyond the prison of bitterness."
— Jane Vennard

• "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you."
— Lewis Smedes

All the religious and spiritual traditions raise up the value of forgiveness yet it remains a difficult and sometimes impossible practice for many people. This is why we need resources like this one to present many ways into forgiveness.

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