Oh good heavens. I guess the purpose of that was just to find a way to sneak in a Bush bash, because it’s doesn’t have anything to do with what you go on to say. You could have mentioned something about forgiving Obama for his working relationship with Bill Ayers, but I guess we’ve already forgiven that.

Moreover, though it may be that the inability to forgive has some detrimental effects on some children, I really tend to doubt that science is replicable or general. Children, like adults, adapt. And the harm may be caused by the adultery in the first instance: why not simply make the law deter the conduct by making it civilly remediable again?

That is, before we adopt a paternalist & very intrusive state action to change individual preferences & reactions to adultery and other kinds of bad marital conduct (psychological abuse, for instance), I’d like to see a better justification. Or at least a reason that we ought to treat marital harm differently from any other kind of legally cognizable harm out there. The stating telling people that they must forgive (on penalty of losing rights to their children) strikes me as a really quick way for the state to lose legitimacy & for judges to face recalcitrant parties. That a lack of forgiveness – potentially – affects kids’ relationship with wrongdoing spouses doesn’t strike me as sufficient to justify such a radical form of paternalism.

I quickly skimmed through your excellent paper, “Cultivating Forgiveness” and highlighted the following passage:

“Consequently, any Healing Divorce program must educate participants as to what forgiveness is, what it is not, why they should forgive and how. This may be taught in six to eight weekly, small group sessions led by mental health professionals, including graduate students, familiar with the forgiveness literature and interventions. It is unlikely that all divorcing parents will want to participate in forgiveness education, especially since they are unlikely to be familiar with the benefits of forgiveness or what the process entails. Given that many divorcing parents are angry and could potentially benefit from forgiving their former spouse, participation in forgiveness education should conceivably be mandatory for all divorcing parents in the same way that parenting education is mandatory in many states. However, due to limited resources and the logistics of training thousands of mental health professionals willing to conduct forgiveness sessions, states might want to mandate participation for high-conflict parents only, at least initially. While parents might resent a compulsory program, they might feel differently after completing it as did most parents who resisted parenting education initially, but later reported that it was beneficial.”

In so far as “mental health professionals” may not subscribe to or be familiar with the worldviews (individuated as ‘lifeworlds’) of those participating in such programs might this not be an obstacle to its success? In other words, and for example, let us say a devout Muslim couple is enrolled in such a program: would the “therapeutic discourse” be conducted in the language and terms familiar to this couple?

And perhaps your experience is far different from mine on this score, but I’m not sure why one would want “graduate students” to play a prominent role in such processes, given their relative lack in most cases of just those sort of life experiences often christened conducive to the requisite knowledge or wisdom in such matters.

There would appear to be compelling evidence that it takes just such disciplined forms of “mind training” to transcend the myriad deleterious effects of “passions” and vices (what the Christian calls ‘sin’ or the Buddhist sees as the effects of a kind of ‘grasping’ [desire gone wild if you will] or attachment and ignorance). To the extent that contemporary forms of psychological therapy or psychotherapy are capable of prompting growth in the psychological awareness, ethical living and self-knowledge essential to personal transformation, they too can be enlisted in this arduous endeavor. However, I think we should be sensitive to the fact that the aforementioned traditions remind us how difficult it is to subdue the passions and transcend “deadly sins” like anger or envy (in fact, I suspect anger is only part of a larger ‘emotional complex’ in situations like your describe here) and thus to learn to learn the art of forgiveness exemplified in the parables and sayings of Jesus in the Gospels (cf. Anna Wierzbicka’s What Did Jesus Mean [2001]).

That said, I look forward to the subject matter of the next post.