For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about forgiveness within religious communities.
Tragedy struck the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006, when a gunman stormed into a schoolhouse, taking hostages and shooting ten girls, killing five, before taking his own life. In the days that followed, members of the community known for living separately from the wider culture made an extraordinary series of public acts and statements, as leaders exhorted the community not to hate the killer — “We must not think evil of this man,” said the grandfather of one of the murdered girls. The day after the victims’ funeral, several members of the Amish community attended the killer’s burial service, where they embraced his widow. Members of the community later collected donations to help support the widow and her three young children.
Such acts of forgiveness in the face of incredible wrongs seem heroic or even saintly, stretching our understanding of what is humanly possible. It is probably no coincidence that such moves often involve members of strongly religious communities — the media have also covered remarkable statements of forgiveness by the victims of shootings at Emmanual AME Church in Charleston, S.C. and First Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., or in response to vandalism at the Al Salam mosque in Fort Smith, Ark.