Justice, like forgiveness, is a loaded word, bandied about by just about everyone - used as much by advocates for penal reform as by those who call for the death penalty. The Forgiveness Project's 2011 annual lecture was bound therefore to cause robust discussion when Clare...

How is it possible to feel the humanity of a person who has systematically and brutally maimed or murdered innocent people for the sake of an ideology?

In 2005 I met Andrew Rice, whose brother was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Andrew...

For three days at the end of June, Google Ideas did something risky, brave and potentially world-shaking. They brought together former extremists from all over the globe -- from the neo-Nazi youths of Milwaukee to the radical Islamists of Tower Hamlets -- and, in a spirit of inquiry, asked the...

I have been troubled lately by the title of a new book called, The Forgiveness Project: The Startling Discovery of How to Overcome Cancer, Find Health, and Achieve Peace, by Rev. Dr Michael S. Barry.
It's not simply that the book borrows the same name...

Watching CCTV footage of 15-year-old Santre Sanchez Gayle carrying a shotgun and turning up at the door of 26-year-old Gulistan Subasi and shooting her dead, is deeply disturbing. Little wonder that Gayle was this week sentenced to serve at least 20 years for her murder. Judge Stephen Kramer...

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been saying some interesting things about forgiveness this week. He told the Radio Times: "I think the 20th century saw such a level of atrocity that it has focused our minds very, very hard on the dangers of forgiving too easily......

I have thought a lot about self-forgiveness recently. It's a topic that keeps coming up, and I have come to think, from the many people I've met through my work with The Forgiveness Project, that it is perhaps the hardest type of forgiveness of all.

Ever since I...

I received a letter sent to The Forgiveness Project's London office the other day from a woman called Amber who has been on a journey of self-forgiveness. After reading the stories on The Forgiveness Project website, she notes that only a couple of the stories are...

In 2003, I was introduced to a man who had committed a double murder. He had recently been released from prison after serving a life sentence and was trying to readjust to a world very different from the one he'd left 15 years earlier. It was the first time I'd...

From the moment I first met Archbishop Desmond Tutu back in 2003, it was always my intention to one day ask him to give a lecture in London on behalf of The Forgiveness Project, an organization which he supports that explores forgiveness and reconciliation through the...

Last October, The Forgiveness Project - a UK-based charity which explores forgiveness and conflict resolution through the stories of real people - held a controversial event at The House of Commons in collaboration with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues. On the day after the...

In November 1993, Gitta Sereny, the distinguished biographer of Albert Speer, wrote in a British Sunday newspaper that the killers of two-year old Jamie Bulger, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, were still children and therefore had a chance of one day being...

A remarkable woman came into my office last year. As director of The Forgiveness Project -- a UK-based organization which explores forgiveness through real-life stories -- I have met a lot of remarkable people, but Susan's story touched me more than most. ("Susan" is not the woman's real...

In No Enemy to Conquer - a fascinating examination of forgiveness in an unforgiving world - the author, Michael Henderson, refers to the malicious rumors of 2007 which alleged that presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama had once attended a radical Muslim school in Indonesia.

Henderson's...

How do you save a relationship after countless betrayals? Can trust ever return? Should you forgive when forgiveness may simply encourage further bad behaviour?

These may well be some of the many questions that Elin Nordegren, the long-suffering wife of Tiger Woods, is contemplating having discovered her husband's multiple...

Itamar Shapira, former soldier in the Israeli army, refusenik and now member of the organization Combatants for Peace, looks uneasy from the moment I greet him. I have been to Tulkarm in the West Bank to talk with former Palestinian militants, and to Tel Aviv to meet former Israeli...

When Pat Magee walks into the House of Commons in London this week, some Members of Parliament will no doubt condemn the very notion of bringing the man who planned and planted the Brighton bomb into the heart of an institution he once tried to destroy.

The event,...

From the mass murderers of Auschwitz, to the Islamic extremists who flew their planes into the World Trade Center, the widespread belief is that those who do grave harm to others to fulfill their ideological purpose are fundamentally different from us. We use a special vocabulary for them: “beasts,” “monsters,”...

Those who hurt others have long been categorized into three distinct types -- the sad, the mad and the outright bad. Where would Phillip Garrido -- rapist, abductor, pedophile and possible murderer -- fit into this rogues gallery of perpetrators? His father's verdict that a motorbike accident and...