Tagged: “Dr. Robert Enright”

How can we inspire someone to be forgiving, but not then feel like a perpetual victim?

Hearing about what forgiveness is and is not can motivate people to forgive.  Simply trying forgiveness can be highly motivating because it puts love in the heart when done well.  Also when forgiving is done well, the forgiver engages in the moral virtue of humility, which should help the forgiver to avoid a continual sense of victimhood with a “you owe me one” attitude.

I know that forgiving is important in both Judaism and Christianity. Is forgiveness mentioned in other faiths or worldviews such as Islam or Buddhism?

There is a book in the Koran called Joseph, which is based on the story of Joseph forgiving his half-brothers in Genesis within the Hebrew scriptures.  Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism have favorable views of forgiving.  My book, Forgiveness Therapy, discusses these different viewpoints.  The different world religions do not talk negatively about forgiveness.  Buddhism does not have a word for forgiveness, but some of the stories in Buddhism show forgiveness.  Again, I discuss this in the book, Forgiveness Therapy.

Free on YouTube – Watch Dr. Robert Enright’s Greek Forgiveness Education Presentation

In case you missed it, you can now watch Dr. Robert Enright’s presentation during yesterday’s (Feb. 4) Greek Forgiveness Education webinar, on YouTube–for free. Details about the webinar can be found in the article posted immediately below this one.

The unique webinar was broadcast live via Zoom video conferencing from Greece. More than 4,500 individuals participated in the webinar or have watched the YouTube video since it was posted.

Dr. Enright, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) was the featured presenter for the webinar. His topic, “The Healing Value of Forgiveness from the Aristotelian Philosophical Perspective,” has special significance in Greece because Greek philosophers like Aristotle not only helped shape the world some twenty centuries ago, but they are still very much alive in the principles underlying what is being taught in the country today.

“I have been relying on Aristotle for 35 years,” Dr. Enright said in his opening remarks during the webinar–the same length of time he has been studying the “moral virtue” (Aristotle’s term) of forgiveness. “The English translation of what Aristotle described as a moral virtue is ‘magnanimity’ or ‘largeness of heart,’” Dr. Enright added–what he calls the very essence of forgiveness.

Following Dr. Enright’s presentation, Dr. Peli Galiti, Director of the IFI’s Greek Forgiveness Education Program spoke on “The Way to Forgiveness: From Theory to Practice.” For the past eight years, Dr. Galiti has been conducting Forgiveness Education training workshops for Greek teachers. During that time, she has trained more than 600 teachers to use the Forgiveness Education Program developed by Dr. Enright which is now being taught to more than 6,000 Greek students.

Free Forgiveness Education Webinar on Feb. 4 Featuring Dr. Robert Enright and Dr. Peli Galiti

FORGIVENESS:
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF A TIMELESS VIRTUE

Live Internet Event

Thursday, February 4, 2021

7:00 p.m. EET (Eastern European Time)
MEETING TIME CONVERSIONS
U.S. – EST – Noon
U.S. – CST – 11:00 a.m.
U.S. – MST – 10:00 a.m.
U.S. – PST – 9:00 a.m.
GMT – 5:00 p.m.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED NO LATER THAN TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2021

The program for this one-of-a-kind free webinar includes presentations by:

• Robert Enright, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) – “The healing value of forgiveness from the Aristotelian philosophical perspective.”
• Peli Galiti, Researcher in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the IFI’s Greek Forgiveness Education Program – “The Way to Forgiveness: From Theory to Practice.”
• Konstantinos Kornarakis, Professor of Christian Ethics – Bioethics in the Department of Theology of the Theological School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens – “Functional and dysfunctional aspects of forgiveness in texts of the ascetic Christian literature.”
• Konstantinos Bikos, Professor of School Pedagogy and New Technologies in the Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – “Socio-emotional and moral development of the Greek student: the contribution of education to forgiveness.”

The webinar has been organized by Dr. Peli Galiti, Ph.D., M.Ed., and her associates at the University of Athens (where she was previously a lecturer in the University’s School of Education) and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th.). For the past eight years, Dr. Galiti has been conducting Forgiveness Education training workshops for Greek teachers and for the past five years that training has been in collaboration with A.U.Th. During those eight years she has trained more than 600 teachers to use the Forgiveness Education Program which is now being taught to more than 6,000 Greek students.

The author of two books, Dr. Galiti has received funding for her work in Greece from the prestigious Stavros Niarchos Foundation, established by Stavros Spyros Niarchos, an Athens native who assembled and operated the largest shipping fleet in the world before his death in 1996. A descriptive video (4 min. 11 sec.) of the Greek Forgiveness Program is available at this YouTube link or you can visit the Greek Forgiveness Education website.

The International Forgiveness Institute’s widely-acclaimed Forgiveness Education Program was developed by Dr. Enright along with collaborating curriculum experts and experienced teachers. Using children’s story books (many by Dr. Seuss) and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) techniques, the Program teaches students about the five moral qualities most important to forgiving another person–inherent worth, moral love, kindness, respect and generosity. The Program is now being used in more than 30 countries around the world.

Additional Webinar Information: 1) Dr. Enright’s opening presentation will be delivered in English while the other three presentations will be in Greek with no English translation or subtitles; 2) The event will take place online on the ZOOM platform for free; 3) Registration must be completed by Tuesday, Feb. 2; and, 4) The link to the meeting will be sent to registered participants by e-mail on the eve of the event; and, 5) More than 700 people have already registered for the webinar.

Registration Form Translations:
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2020: A Record-Setting Year for Dr. Robert Enright and the International Forgiveness Institute

While “perseverance” and “grit” may  be apt descriptors for what turned out to be perhaps the most peculiar year in modern history, forgiveness researcher Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, has a different take on 2020: “Without question, it turned out to be our most productive year since I began studying forgiveness three decades ago.”

Scientific Research Studies:

To illustrate his point, the man Time magazine called “the forgiveness trailblazer,” rattled off the 11 scientifically-based manuscripts he and various team members completed and had published or accepted for publication during the year. Covering a wide range of cultural diversity, and encompassing studies in seven countries with both adult and child participants, those studies included (click title to read more):

• Compassionate love and dispositional forgiveness: Does compassionate love predict dispositional forgiveness? (Conducted in the United States) – Published in Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health.
• Measuring intergroup forgiveness: The Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory. (China, Taiwan, Slovenia,  United States) – Peace and Conflict Studies.
• Effectiveness of forgiveness education with adolescents in reducing anger and ethnic prejudice in Iran. (Iran) – Journal of Educational Psychology.
• A philosophical and psychological examination of “justice first”: Toward the need for both justice and forgiveness when conflict arises. – Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology [in press].
• An addition to peace education: Toward the process of a Just and Merciful Community in schools. (China and the United States) – Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology [in press].
• Evaluation of the effectiveness and satisfaction of the Learning to Forgive Program for the prevention of bullying. (Spain) – Electronic Journal of Educational Psychology [in press].
• Trauma and healing in the under-served populations of homelessness and corrections: Forgiveness therapy as an added component to intervention. – Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy [in press]. 
• Validating the Enright Self-Forgiveness Inventory. (United States) – Current Psychology [in press].
• A randomized controlled trial of a forgiveness intervention program with female acid attack survivors in Pakistan. (Pakistan) –Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy [in press].
•  “A Review of the Empirical Research Using Enright’s Process Model of Interpersonal Forgiveness” (International) – Handbook of forgiveness [2020].
• “Forgiveness Within Psychotherapy” (International) – The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences: Models and Theories.

Forgiveness Presentations:

In addition to his first love (scientific research on forgiveness, as evidenced by the list above), Dr. Enright developed and delivered targeted forgiveness presentations in the U.S. and around the world during 2020. His more noteworthy audiences included:

• Staff and imprisoned people at Her Majesty’s Prison – Edinburgh, Scotland.
• Doctors and medical specialists attending an online conference on polyclonal immunoglobulins in patients with multiple myeloma – Bratislava, Slovakia. 
• Pediatricians, oncologists, and cancer treatment specialists attending the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Educational Conference – Madison, Wisconsin.
• Faculty and research associates at the Pan-European University – Bratislava, Slovakia.
• School administrators and teachers – Belfast, Northern Ireland.
• Students and faculty of Liberty University – Lynchburg, Virginia.
• Rotary Club members – Richmond, California.

Media Interviews, Podcasts, Video Productions:

As a highly-sought-after media personality, Dr. Enright’s 2020 media interviews included:

• A 67-minute podcast hosted and broadcast by Dr. Alexandra Miller, a popular family relations psychologist, on Rehabilitating those who are ‘Forgotten’: People in Prison. The podcast was downloaded by individuals in 225 US cities and 22 foreign countries in just the first three weeks after it was recorded in July.
• A multi-segment forgiveness video produced for Revolution Ventures, Bangalore, India.
• A “therapeutic music-discussion video” with song-writer/performer Sam Ness that was produced for those struggling with anguish caused by COVID-19. The therapeutic video, called “How to Beat the Coronavirus Lockdown Blues,” was distributed worldwide through venues including YouTube.
• A video interview at the International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.
• Interview for DER SPIEGEL/Spiegel online, a German weekly news magazine that has the largest circulation of any such publication in Europe.
• Interview with author Aaron Hutchins for Maclean’s—a current affairs magazine with 2.4 million readers based in Toronto,  Canada.
• Interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH, Germany’s largest daily newspaper.
• Podcast interview with Dr. Peter Miller, Sport and the Growing Good: 8 Keys to Forgiveness.
• Live interview, The Drew Mariani Show (national), Relevant Radio.
• Interview with Dr. Max Bonilla, International Director, Expanded Reason webinar, Madrid, Spain.

BLOGS AND MORE:

The activity doesn’t stop there. During 2020, Dr. Enright:

• Authored 12 new forgiveness-related blogs for Psychology Today and 12 more for “Our Forgiveness Blog” on the International Forgiveness Institute website.
• Provided written responses on the IFI website for 208 “Ask Dr. Forgiveness” questions.
• Together with Jacqueline Song, IFI researcher and creator of the IFI’s Driver Safety Campaign, distributed more than 5,000 “Drive for Others’ Lives” bumper stickers requested by website visitors and funded by a grant from the Green Bay Packers Foundation.