Film Examines Amish, Others in Forgiveness

c. 2007 Religion News Service HARRISBURG, Pa. _ Filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, who set out to explore the nature of forgiveness, was almost finished when the news broke about the Amish school shooting in West Nickel Mines, Pa., last October. So he went to Lancaster County to film a segment on what happened after a gunman […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

HARRISBURG, Pa. _ Filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, who set out to explore the nature of forgiveness, was almost finished when the news broke about the Amish school shooting in West Nickel Mines, Pa., last October.

So he went to Lancaster County to film a segment on what happened after a gunman invaded the school and killed five girls and then himself. What he found was an Amish delegation that went to the gunman’s widow to show support and forgiveness.


“We were convinced we could not make the film without the Amish,” Doblmeier said recently.

Their example is one of the segments featured in “The Power of Forgiveness,” to be aired next fall on PBS. The director _ who also made the acclaimed 2006 PBS documentary “Bonhoeffer,” about the pastor and Nazi resister _ said his latest topic engages all faith groups and the wider culture.

“People feel as though we’ve become an angry culture,” he said in an interview. “We are a nation at war. We are a litigious society. You can feel it in the movies we make, in the news at night.”

The film presents religious teachers with spiritual arguments for forgiveness and psychologists with utilitarian ones _ about the beneficial effect on blood pressure, for example.

Research on forgiveness has exploded in recent years amid generous funding earmarked for the topic.

The Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute have been eager to fund forgiveness studies, notes Donald Kraybill, who studies the Amish and appears in the film.

Researchers have also been motivated by hope for new therapies for mental illness and by daily news about horror wrought by vengeance, adds Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College.


The film provides other powerful contemporary stories, including one about Azim Khamisa, who lost his son in a San Diego street shooting. Khamisa, a Muslim, forgives the young gunman, befriends the gunman’s Baptist grandfather and tours with him to promote alternatives to violence among teens.

And there’s German President Johannes Rau, appearing before the Israeli Parliament and making an emotional plea for forgiveness more than a half century after the end of the Holocaust.

There are teachers in Northern Ireland _ Roman Catholics at one school and Protestants at another _ leading pupils in a special curriculum on forgiveness in a child’s world.

There are women who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center whose struggles with anger and regret examine forgiveness as a tough and complex process.

“I think what was so shocking to people was that the Amish forgave so quickly,” Kraybill said in an interview.

“Most psychologists would say forgiveness is a journey,” he said, “but here were these people six hours after the shooting, walking over to say, ‘We forgive.”’


The collective nature of Amish forgiveness was also intriguing, Doblmeier said. With the strong support of the community, bereft parents “didn’t have to act out of anger,” he said.

Doblmeier said he hopes to study collective forgiveness more thoroughly before his film is completed _ perhaps by visiting South Africa and its struggle to overcome the legacy of apartheid.

(Mary Warner writes for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa.)

Editors: To obtain photos from “The Power of Forgiveness,” go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

KRE/LF END WARNER

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