Journal Article Reveiw: the Church as Forgiving Community: an Initial Model

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Journal Article Review II: The Church as Forgiving Community: An Initial Model Journal Article Review II: The Church As Forgiving Community: An Initial Model Summary Magnuson and Enright (2008) offer a discussion of forgiveness and how important it is to the complex human being. Forgiveness is first recognized in the Bible. It is a way of ending resentment and responding to others in a generously. Forgiveness does not involve forgetting the unjust act that occurred, but it offers mercy to the offender (Magnuson & Enright, 2008). Even though forgiveness is a part of the Church in that it is expressed in God's Word, social scientists such as Smedes (1984) and Worthington and DiBlasio (1990) explored the topic even more in the recent years. Enright's process model and Worthington's REACH model also emphasize forgiveness. Enright's process model delivers us four stages of forgiveness: uncovering anger, deciding to forgive, working on forgiveness, and the outcome. It has been discovered that this roadmap to forgiveness actually helps in the psychological healing of the victim. Worthington's model adds to this theory by proposing that a supportive environment helps provide empathy for the offender, in which empathy is the key to forgiving. Later studies even introduce forgiveness interventions to help aid in the forgiving process. These interventions help forgiving, forgiving increases psychological health, and psychological health can even correlate to physical health, such as "lower blood pressure, lower skin conductance-level scores, lower heart rates, and less tonic eye muscle tension" (Magnuson & Enright, 2008). Now that Magnuson and Enright (2008) have established that forgiveness is healthy to human beings, they turn their concern to children (p.15). This is where they developed the "The Forgiving Communities." They believe that

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