Love Means Learning to Say “I’m Sorry”: Restoring Relationships, Seeking Forgiveness
Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/12/2014
9:00 am - 1:45 pm
Location
Northway Christian Church
Categories
It’s difficult to say which is more difficult—offering forgiveness or needing it. And except for the few saints among us, most of us need sometimes to seek forgiveness. In a world of broken relationships, interpersonal and communal, the capacity to seek forgiveness is just as important as the capacity to forgive. But though children are usually taught to say, “I’m sorry,” few adults can practice what we teach! With so much popular emphasis on being right, winning, not backing down—few of us are equipped to seek forgiveness. This seminar will explore Christian resources for offering to others the kind of genuine apology that makes forgiveness more possible: resilient humility, relational confession, and life-renewing repentance.
Kathleen J. Greider is the Edna and Lowell Craig Professor of Practical Theology, Spiritual Care, and Counseling at Claremont School of Theology, in the Claremont Lincoln University Consortium. She also serves as staff counselor and clinical supervisor at The Clinebell Institute for Pastoral Counseling and Psychotherapy. Her research and teaching interests include spiritual care, practical and pastoral theology, interculturality, the interplay of social and personal change, and depth psychology. She has authored Reckoning with Aggression: Theology, Violence, and Vitality (1997) and Much Madness Is Divinest Sense: Spiritual Wisdom in Memoirs of Soul Suffering (2007). Ordained by the United Methodist Church and a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, she has clinical pastoral experience in parish ministry, spiritual direction, general hospital and in-patient psychiatric settings, and pastoral counseling. She has lectured in France, Germany, Ghana, England, Israel, Poland, South Africa, and South Korea.