If you’ve got any suggestions or comments please post them below.

I’d love to hear about your favorite forgiveness book or movie!

Movies
	The Power of Forgiveness DVD: Voted Best Documentary 2007, Sun Valley Film Festival. Features seven dramatic forgiveness stories and bonus features include Desmond Tutu on truth and reconciliation. This 78-minute documentary includes stories with The Amish, North Ireland, Ground Zero, renowned Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, Nobel peace Laureate Elie Wiesel and interviews with best-selling authors Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul), Marianne Williamson (The Gift of Change) and others. Only $24.95 + shipping ($5). Online guides for community conversations are available at www.journeyfilms.com.
	Paradise Now: The story places two close friends, Palestinians Said and Khaled, recruited by an extremist group to perpetrate a terrorist attack in Tel-Aviv, blowing up themselves. However, things go wrong and both friends must separate in the border. One of them, maintaining in his purpose of carry the attack to the end, and the other will have his doubts about it.
	Smoke Signals: The movie poses two essential questions: 1 – If someone else has mistreated, hurt, abandoned, or disrespected you, is it possible to forgive them if they’ve NEVER asked forgiveness, never done anything to “put it right,” And 2 – if it is possible should you?
	The Power of Forgiveness: Every human being gets hurt in ways both big and small, and in turn we sometimes inflict hurt on others. There comes a time when we face the difficult choice to forgive others and to forgive ourselves. But forgiveness can seem impossible, even undesirable. The Power of Forgiveness presents four studies that open our minds and our hearts to a new understanding of forgiveness so we can embrace forgiveness as a key to a wholesome and free life.
	Power of Forgiveness: Story of Karla Faye Tucker: On February 3, 1998, Karla Faye Tucker was put to death by the state of Texas, the first woman to be executed in America in fifteen years. She was a confessed pick-axe murderer. But in prison her life dramatically changed through a religious conversion experience. This former drug-crazed prostitute and savage killer became what many saw as a fully rehabilitated and beautiful, loving person. In this program you can see and decide for yourself.
	Journey Toward Forgiveness: This hour-long documentary powerfully demonstrates that those who are able to embark on a process towards forgiveness – though heartrending and difficult – find it to be the path to inner healing.
	Tsotsi: Captivating audiences worldwide, this compelling story of crime and redemption has earned countless awards around the globe. On the edges of Johannesburg, Tsotsi’s life has no meaning beyond survival. One night, in desperation, Tsotsi steals a woman’s car. But as he is driving off, he makes a shocking discovery in the backseat. In one moment his life takes a sharp turn and leads him down an unexpected path to redemption – giving him hope for a future he never could have imagined. Tsotsi is an extraordinary portrait of the choices that are made in life and how compassion can endure in the human heart.
	End of the Spear: End of the Spear is the story of Mincayani, a Waodani tribesman from the jungles of Ecuador. When five young missionaries, among them Jim Elliot and Nate Saint, are speared to death by the Waodani in 1956, a series of events unfold to change the lives of not only the slain missionaries’ families, but also Mincayani and his people.
	Gandhi: Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1982 multiple-Oscar winner is an engrossing, reverential look at the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who introduced the doctrine of nonviolent resistance to the colonized people of India and who ultimately gained the nation its independence.
	The Shawshank Redemption: Tim Robbins plays a banker named Andy who’s sent to Shawshank Prison on a murder charge, but as he gets to know a life-term prisoner named Red (Morgan Freeman), we realize there’s reason to believe the banker’s crime was justifiable. We also realize that Andy’s calm, quiet exterior hides a great reserve of patience and fortitude, and Red comes to admire this mild-mannered man who first struck him as weak and unfit for prison life. So it is that The Shawshank Redemption builds considerable impact as a prison drama that defies the conventions of the genre (violence, brutality, riots) to illustrate its theme of faith, friendship, and survival.
	What the Bleep Do We Know!?: What The #$*! is a radical departure from convention. It demands a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed, not even dreamed of since Copernicus. It’s a documentary. It’s a story. It’s mind-blowing special effects. This film plunges you into a world where quantum uncertainty is demonstrated – where neurological processes, and perceptual shifts are engaged and lived by its protagonist – where everything is alive, and reality is changed by every thought.
	Paperclips: Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee is the setting for this documentary about an extraordinary experiment in Holocaust education. Struggling to grasp the concept of six-million Holocaust victims, the students decide to collect six-million paper clips to better understand the extent of this crime against humanity. The film details how the students met Holocaust survivors from around the world and how the experience transformed them and their community.
Forgiveness Books
	Forgiveness: The Greatest Healer of All: by Gerald G. Jampolsky and Neale Donald Walsch – This is a small book with a big message: if people are to heal themselves and learn to live with each other in love and harmony, forgiveness must become as important and regular as breathing.
	Radical Forgiveness, Making Room for the Miracle: by Colin C. Tipping – With this book, Colin Tipping has updated and made easy to understand a concept that has been around for a long time but was hitherto inaccessible to all but the spiritual intellectual elite or ‘spiritual insiders.’ You will find that you cannot read this book without being changed — not because of what you learn necessarily, but because of what stirs in you as you read. It is a book that could, quite literally, change your life!
	No Future Without Forgiveness: by Desmond Tutu – No Future Without Forgiveness is Tutu’s remarkable personal memoir of his time as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It records his insistence of the need to discover a “third way” in the healing of the national psyche and his powerful belief that “we can indeed transcend the conflicts of the past, we can hold hands as we realize our common humanity.”
	The Wisdom of Forgiveness: by Dalai Lama and Victor Chan – “Do you hate the Chinese?” Chan asked the Dalai Lama when they first met in India in 1972. It was a live question, since Chan hailed from the country that had forced the Tibetan spiritual leader into exile and subjugated the Tibetan people. The Dalai Lama replied immediately with the English word “no,” then stated through an interpreter that he had forgiven the Chinese and did not blame China’s people. Drawing on Buddhist principles, this book loosely discusses His Holiness’s ideas on forgiveness.
	The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace: by Jack Kornfield – Bestselling author Jack Kornfield has put together a how-to book – his most ambitious work yet – to encourage the best side of humanity. In The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, Kornfield uses the evocative power of aphorisms to spark feelings and thoughts that can germinate and grow.
	The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness: by Simon Wiesenthal – Author Weisenthal recalls his demoralizing life in a concentration camp and his envy of the dead Germans who have sunflowers marking their graves. At the time he assumed his grave would be a mass one, unmarked and forgotten. Then, one day, a dying Nazi soldier asks Weisenthal for forgiveness for his crimes against the Jews. What would you do?
	Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust: by Immaculee Ilibagiza – In 1994, Rwandan native Ilibagiza was 22 years old and home from college to spend Easter with her devout Catholic family, when the death of Rwanda’s Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of nearly one million ethnic Tutsis in the country. She survived by hiding in a Hutu pastor’s tiny bathroom with seven other starving women for 91 cramped, terrifying days. This searing firsthand account of Ilibagiza’s experience cuts two ways: her description of the evil that was perpetrated, including the brutal murders of her family members, is soul-numbingly devastating, yet the story of her unquenchable faith and connection to God throughout the ordeal uplifts and inspires. Ilibagiza’s remarkable path to forgiving the perpetrators and releasing her anger is a beacon to others who have suffered injustice.
	As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda: by Catherine Claire Larson – If you were told that a murderer was to be released into your neighborhood, how would you feel? But what if it weren’t only one, but thousands? Could there be a common roadmap to reconciliation? Could there be a shared future after unthinkable evil? If forgiveness is possible after the slaughter of nearly a million in a hundred days in Rwanda, then today, more than ever, we owe it to humanity to explore how one country is addressing perceptual, social-psychological, and spiritual dimensions to achieve a more lasting peace. If forgiveness is possible after genocide, then perhaps there is hope for the comparably smaller rifts that plague our relationships, our communities, and our nation. As We Forgive explores the pain, the mystery, and the hope through seven compelling stories of those who have made this journey toward reconciliation. The result is a narrative that breathes with humanity and is as haunting as it is hopeful.
	Man’s Search for Meaning: Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory — known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”) — holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. A true classic.
	A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid: by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela – A Human Being Died That Night recounts an extraordinary dialogue. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist who grew up in a black South African township, reflects on her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned death squads under apartheid. Gobodo-Madikizela met with de Kock in Pretoria’s maximum-security prison, where he is serving a 212-year sentence for crimes against humanity. In profoundly arresting scenes, Gobodo-Madikizela conveys her struggle with contradictory internal impulses to hold him accountable and to forgive.
	A Course in Miracles: by Helen Schucman – When Helen Schucman, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University, began hearing an inner voice of rapid dictation (which she eventually identified as the voice of Jesus), she decided to start taking shorthand notes. Then, with the support and encouragement of a colleague, Schucman continued to assemble the teachings that came to her. The result is A Course in Miracles, a book that has spawned hundreds of study groups and an international following.
	The Disappearance of the Universe: Straight Talk About Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness: by Gary Renard – What would you do if you were sitting quietly in your living room when a mysterious couple appeared from out of nowhere — and then told you they were “ascended masters” who had come to reveal the miraculous powers of forgiveness? When two such teachers appeared before Gary Renard in 1992, he chose to listen to them. The result is an extraordinary record of 17 mind-bending conversations that took place over nearly a decade, reorienting the author’s life and giving the world an uncompromising perspective on A Course in Miracles — a spiritual teaching destined to change human history.
	Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death: by Gary Renard – Like Gary’s first book, The Disappearance of the Universe, this work elaborates on the teachings of two spiritual classics, The Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles. By focusing on a unique brand of quantum forgiveness, rather than the old-fashioned kind, and taking the understanding of the importance of thought up to a whole new level, your goal will become nothing less than to break the cycle of birth and death.
	Forgive for Good: by Frederic Luskin, MD – Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, insists Fred Luskin in Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, nor does it mean condoning bad behavior. What it does mean is that you “take your hurt less personally, take responsibility for how you feel, and become a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell.” Luskin, a practicing psychologist and co-founder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, shows why forgiveness is important for mental and physical health, explains how to form a grievance and suggests practical steps for healing.
	Forgiveness And Child Abuse: Would You Forgive?: by Lois Einhorn Ph.d. – This is a book about forgiveness and child abuse. It asks the question: Do you forgive your parents? How do you forgive yourself? These questions and others call for a thoughtful introspection by the reader to formulate an answer or response. Fifty-three well known personalities responded to these questions. The group includes therapists, spiritual advisers, activists, children’s advocates, song writers, and other leaders in the field of forgiveness and abuse. The answers are profound and reveal beautiful insights in personal forgiveness and the resulting freedom this can produce in the victim.
	Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate, by Michael Henderson – While many books on the market encourage readers to learn to forgive their enemies, this is the first that focuses on the “forgiveness movement” in which the leader of countries or other organizations ask forgiveness from those their countries have injured. Stories include the development of “National Sorry Day” in Australia regarding abuse of the Aboriginal people, the efforts of Nelson Mandela and others in South Africa to forgive the horrors of the past and focus on building a new country, and the apologies given by the United States to the Japanese interred in camps during World War II, one of whom states here that the apology was much more important than the reparitions. It is especially instructive to see how people can move past their anger and how forgiveness often serves as the catalyst for major change.
	Finding Forgiveness, by Eileen R. Borris-Dunchunstang, Ed.D. – In Finding Forgiveness internationally acclaimed expert on conflict resolution and trauma recovery Eileen R. Borris-Dunchunstang outlines her proven, seven-step program for shedding your emotional baggage associated with loss, betrayal, or resentment. Modifying the techniques she uses to resolve international conflict to address personal issues, Borris-Dunchunstang gives you the tools to break free of anger and bitterness and find your path to healing.
	When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold Kushner – When Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease and that he would only live until his early teens, he was faced with one of life’s most difficult questions: Why, God? Years later, Rabbi Kushner wrote this straightforward, elegant contemplation of the doubts and fears that arise when tragedy strikes. Kushner shares his wisdom as a rabbi, a parent, a reader, and a human being. Often imitated but never superseded, When Bad Things Happen to Good People is a classic that offers clear thinking and consolation in times of sorrow.
	A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier: This is the story of Ishmael Beah, who at 12 years old becomes involved in the civil war in Sierra Leone. He shares his story of what is was like to be in the army, involved in drugs, killing and being in the company of sociopathic cohorts. Finally he is brought to a rehab center sponsored by UNICEF and becomes a spokesman for the center. When war continues to become worse, his story moves to the USA where he lives today. His memoir is told is a very accessible and engaging way and forgiveness is key to his process.
	The Magic of Forgiveness: Emotional Freedom and Transformation at Midlife, A Book for Women Forgiveness: is not an event, it is a process. Forgiveness is most powerful when a woman reaches midlife: a natural time for reflection when she stands at a biological and emotional crossroads. In this groundbreaking book – therapist Tian Dayton shows women how assessing their lives and forgiving old wounds is as essential to their well-being as proper nutrition and retirement planning. Left unresolved, past hurts wield their power from within and can contribute to depression and anxiety, undermining the immune system and ultimately opening the door to a multitude of diseases. And harboring resentment prevents us from engaging in deep, meaningful relationships. Through solid research, poignant case studies and personal examples, Dr. Dayton guides women through the sometimes painful but healing process to provide the comfort that may have eluded them for years. This beautifully written book will open women’s eyes to the liberating power of forgiveness and provide the ability to find true joy.
	Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy – On Monday morning, October 2, 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. In front of twenty-five horrified pupils, thirty-two-year-old Charles Roberts ordered the boys and the teacher to leave. After tying the legs of the ten remaining girls, Roberts prepared to shoot them execution style with an automatic rifle and four hundred rounds of ammunition. He opened fire on all of them, killing five and leaving the others critically wounded. He then shot himself as police stormed the building. His motivation? “I’m angry at God for taking my little daughter,” he told the children before the massacre. The story captured the attention of broadcast and print media in the United States and around the world. By Tuesday morning some fifty television crews had clogged the small village of Nickel Mines, staying for five days until the killer and the killed were buried. The blood was barely dry on the schoolhouse floor when Amish parents brought words of forgiveness to the family of the one who had slain their children. The outside world was incredulous that such forgiveness could be offered so quickly for such a heinous crime. Of the hundreds of media queries that the authors received about the shooting, questions about forgiveness rose to the top. Forgiveness, in fact, eclipsed the tragic story, trumping the violence and arresting the world’s attention.
	The Gifts of Imperfection – Brené Brown, Ph.D., is a leading expert on authenticity, shame, and courage and in her book she shares what she’s learned from a decade of research on the power of Wholehearted Living. Dr. Brown’s most unique contribution comes from her 10-year groundbreaking study on vulnerability and shame. In her book, she not only gives us direction for living a more authentic life, but courageously talks about “the things that get in the way.” Using personal stories of her own struggle to “embrace vulnerability” she writes about the experiences we all have, but few of us are willing to discuss.