Background: Interest in the relationship between forgiveness and health is steadily growing across disciplines within the research community. While there are multiple forms of forgiveness, past research has focused principally on studying forgiveness of others, whereas longitudinal evidence on the associations between other forms of forgiveness and health remains scarce. Methods: Using longitudinal data from the Nurses' Health Study II (from the 2008 Trauma Exposure and Post-traumatic Stress Supplementary Survey to 2015 questionnaire wave), this study employed an outcome-wide analytic approach to prospectively examine the association between two forms of religiously or spiritually motivated forgiveness, namely, self-forgiveness and divine forgiveness, and a wide array of subsequent psychosocial well-being, mental health, health behavior, and physical health outcomes among middle-aged female nurses (N = 54,703 for self-forgiveness; N = 51,661 for divine forgiveness). All models controlled for sociodemographic factors, prior religious service attendance, and prior values of all outcome variables wherever data were available. Bonferroni correction was used to account for multiple testing. Results: Self-forgiveness was strongly associated with greater psychosocial well-being (e.g., for top vs. bottom level of self-forgiveness, β = 0.23, 95% CI: 0.20, 0.25 for positive affect) and lower psychological distress (e.g., β = −0.21, 95% CI: −0.23, −0.18 for depressive symptoms). To a lesser extent, divine forgiveness was also associated with higher levels of psychological well-being and lower psychological distress. For both forgiveness types, there was little evidence of association with physical health or health behavior outcomes, though possible marginal evidence for an association of self-forgiveness with increased mortality.
In this article I suggest that attending to the water imagery in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping can reveal a sophisticated account of the sacraments, one that anticipates by several years important developments in recent Christian theology. I also argue that the novel seems thus to suggest something crucial about the nature of literary representation itself, about writing’s relationship to the reality of love. Briefly put, in Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson not only proposes a novel sacramental theology and anticipates its development in other thinkers, she also suggests a sort of sacramentality inherent to the very act of literary writing.
This article proposes a new understanding of unconditional forgiveness as a human moral act, based on brief considerations of Scripture and atonement theology, as well as attention to forgiveness as a public and pastoral practice. The article seeks to define unconditional forgiveness as a specific and limited discipline of Christian non-violence, and as a pastoral and spiritual practice of Christian mourning.
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