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Sarah Masters reviews the film

The Power of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is at the forefront of scientific research conducted by health care specialists ranging from psychiatrists and family therapists to neurologists. Forgiveness is a tenet of the major faith traditions. The intersection of science and religion on the subject of forgiveness is what inspired award-winning filmmaker Martin Doblmeier to spend close to two years producing this documentary on the power of forgiveness.

Doblmeier conducts interviews with a wide range of individuals including, among others, the Reverend James Forbes, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Moore, Elie Weisel, and Marianne Williamson.

Doblmeier also travels to places such as the 9/11 World Trade Center sight, Northern Ireland, and the Amish countryside to explore in-depth a number of powerful stories of forgiveness. He examines how the scientific community measures the physical and mental benefits of letting go of grief and resentment.

The Power of Forgiveness is a hopeful film, showing, as the filmmaker says, that “…this simple act can how powerful consequences, and may lead to personal and spiritual transformation.”

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Completed: 2007
Running Time: 78 Minutes
Director: Martin Doblmeier

If you are interested in purchasing this film, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Masterworks” on the homepage for more information. The cost of the DVD is $24.95.

Book Review

Dr. Terry R. Bard, Rabbi, reviews

The Sanctity of Human Life

In the Spring of 1917, the Rev. Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch was invited to deliver the Taylor Lectures at Yale University. These lectures later comprised the content of his book A Theology for the Social Gospel. Forty-one years later, John Courtney Murray, S.J., compiled lectures that had offered at the College of New Rochelle and Marquette University into a 1958 volume entitled We Hold These Truths – Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Both of these collections represented early efforts at identifying how to articulate religious perspectives into the context and politics of American life and culture. In many ways, each of these offerings was considered an audacious enterprise certain to stir controversy and comment. To some extent, both were prophetic, the former stimulating the thoughts and activities of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, the latter creating a substrate for many of the concerns to be addressed at the Vatican Council II conferences under the leadership of Pope John XXIII.

The task of connecting the gaps between religious conviction, philosophical reflection, and political decision-making are daunting. How can each domain retain its own inherent integrity and yet inform the other?

Rabbi Dr. David Novak’s recent offering, The Sanctity of Human Life, represents continuity with the efforts to connect these perspectives. This book is an attempt to identify and individuate personal beliefs, social ethical values, and political decision making from each other as well as to bring these three arenas together in a way that Novak suggests could be foundational for public discourse.

Dr. Novak selects three issues current in public discourse through which he applies his own methodology to make these connections. The use of embryonic stem cells, arguments for socialized medicine, and physician-assisted suicide have all received much press, some public debate, and challenges from both the religious and philosophical communities. However, most discussions have failed to bring the thoughtful and sophisticated thinking to the forum in a way that Novak has done.

Novak’s style is reflective, at times personal, but overall pedantic. This volume is not light reading, and the subjects he addresses are not trivial. Like Rauschenbusch and Murray, papers he has presented comprise this text. Though similar in style, each of the volume’s three chapters offers a little different pace. Chapter 2, “A Jewish Argument for Socialized Medicine” is much more sermonic and, at times, polemical in tone.

Talmudic argumentation utilizing precedents to support conclusions frames the volume’s three discourses. Possibly as extensions of this rabbinical model practiced through the millennia, most western jurists train to argue all sides of a given case. This model generates the question whether conclusions are the natural outgrowths of precedents leaving open the possibility that precedents are used in the service of existing conclusions.

Although this process and these questions characterize Talmudic reasoning, the philosophical model of argumentation usually evolves more simply and deductively. Possibly due to the topics selected, Novak’s model of argumentation from both Jewish and philosophical perspectives appear quite similar. In both, the precedents he uses are highly selective in an effort to bring authority to his arguments. Although Dr. Novak does introduce challenges contrary to his precedents, most often he dismisses these as inconsequential or simply wrong and fails to acknowledge them as derivative of alternative a priori postulates.

Each of the three topics at hand has practical application. Yet, as Novak introduces personal anecdotes to exemplify the application of his conclusions pastorally or personally, his responses appear more instructive than pastoral. He suggests how people should manage the concern at hand rather than choosing to guide them toward their own responses.

In the first Chapter, Novak sets the stage for the perspectival differences between religion, philosophy, and politics. In the last chapter he is most explicit in describing how to take principals and conclusions from religious/theological argumentation and reframe them into theoretical and useful constructs that can be generalized for application in the political arena. This process is particularly instructive and helpful for those who come from explicit traditions not normative in secular society and its political representatives.

This text is most helpful in expressing how to bridge religious and philosophical models of thinking with political arguments and applications. Though not all will share the conclusions that Novak derives in each chapter, the process he advocates could be most helpful for many. The Sanctity of Human Life is an intense read that is likely to provide much fodder on which the dedicated and persevering reader can munch.

Rabbi David Novak, Ph.D. The Sanctity of Human Life. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2007, pp 186.

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