Ethical Issues Related to Forgiveness and Justice
Keynote Speaker: Everett L. Worthington, Ph.D.
Friday, April 24, 2009
8:45 am - 12:00 pm - Morning Session
AND/OR
1:00-4:15 pm - Afternoon Session
Hostetter Chapel ~ Messiah College ~ Grantham, PA
About the Keynote Speaker
Everett Worthington , Ph.D. , is Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (largest state university in Virginia). He is also a licensed Clinical Psychologist in Virginia. He has published over 20 books and over 200 articles and scholarly chapters, mostly on forgiveness, marriage, and family topics. He frequently discusses forgiveness, marriage, and family in media.
He became interested in forgiveness through his practice in couple counseling, and he began conducting research on forgiveness in 1990. He focused his early research on forgiveness and reconciliation in couples and families, and that interest continues to date. 
He also has developed and studied the effectiveness of psychoeducational groups in secular milieus to help people deal with unforgiveness across a variety of relationships within the same group.
In the last ten years, he has studied how forgiveness and justice work together and can oppose each other. He became interested in this after the murder of his mother. Ev forgave the murderer, as did his brother and sister. They each consider that forgiveness as a legacy that their mother passed to them. Still, the emotional fallout of dealing with a violent murder can be devastating, and Ev’s brother committed suicide in distress about such issues. Ev inevitably felt self-condemnation over his failings in his relationship with his brother, and he has been studying forgiveness of self intensively.
From 1998 to 2005, he directed A Campaign for Forgiveness Research (www.forgiving.org), a non-profit organization that supports research into forgiving. He works to build a field of studying forgiveness scientifically. The Campaign is now under a new director who is focusing on dissemination of the findings.
Ev is personally a committed Christian and has talked extensively throughout the world in venues that were composed of Christians and those that were thoroughly secular. He has worked with several governments around the world, sharing about the promotion of forgiveness and reconciliation. Given his lifelong work in a secular state university and his Christian beliefs, he considers himself as attempting to be a bridge-builder between Christian and secular, academic and lay, research and practice communities. He considers his mission as "to bring forgiveness into every willing heart, home, and homeland."
He has one new book—Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application (Brunner-Routledge, August, 2006), which explains his stress-and-coping theory of forgiveness, describes his psychoeducational programs to promote forgiveness and reconciliation, and discusses a model of psychotherapy to promote forgiveness. He has four other recent books, Handbook of Forgiveness (Brunner Routledge, 2005), an edited collection of reviews of research from the top researchers in the world representing the state of the science; Forgiving and Reconciling: Bridges to Wholeness and Hope (InterVarsity Press, 2003), a Christian-oriented account of his own method of helping people forgive; The Power of Forgiving (Templeton Foundation Press, 2005) a collection of quotes on forgiveness within a narrated essay on finding the treasure of forgiveness in the ruins of relationships; and a revised edition of Hope-focused Marriage Counseling (InterVarsity Press, 2005), where hope-focused marriage enrichment has been adjudicated to be one of four empirically supported treatments for marriage enrichment. His most recent book is Humility: The Quiet Virtue.
Ev actually has a life also. He is a member of Christ Presbyterian Church (and also elder), where he has attended with his wife since 1978 (and family while the children were at home). He has a wife, Kirby, and they have been married since 1970. Kirby is a child development and parenting specialist, and conducts workshops and writes books on parenting and children. Ev and Kirby have four adult children who are scattered around the world. Christen (1976) is married to Steve and they have two children (Bethany and Josh). They live in Bahrain. Jonathan is married to Lynsey, and they live in Scotland where Jonathan is working on his PhD in Theology and Lynsey is working on their first child (due May, 2008). Becca is in the Peace Corps in Moldova (next to Romania and just south of the Ukraine). Katy Anna is in Richmond, having returned from school in London and travels around the continent. Ev plays tournament tennis (mostly in the age-group tournaments throughout Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic region) and has a clear goal for his tennis: someday, he wants to be ranked number one in the world in the over-100 category. Ev also does ballroom dancing, and he blushes to admit that he competed in 2007 in the Dancing with the Stars Traveling Show at the Richmond Coliseum. (He and his partner didn’t win. They were defeated by a couple who were ten years old.)
