This little book stems from years of workshops on anger, forgiveness, and other related matters carried out by the authors, and reflects the lessons of their experience thought through and thoroughly integrated with Catholic doctrine, Scripture, a wealth of other people’s narratives and experiences, and ultimately oriented towards the sacrament of Reconciliation. This book would be a very valuable and useful resource for individual spiritual development, for pastoral counseling, or for workshops and group exercises, dealing with reconciliation and forgiveness, even for Catechesis of adults or adolescents.

Its treatment of anger, however, while better than many approaches taken towards that extremely significant human emotion, does have some defects, stemming not so much from what is explicitly said as from what is merely assumed, passed over, or ignored. This small deficit is minimized if the book is viewed as merely a practical resource for the purposes just mentioned, and not as a work purporting to provide and promote a full intellectual grasp of its central matters: anger, forgiveness, and reconciliation, illuminated by Christian teachings and divine grace. To be sure, it would be unfair and unrealistic to expect systematic theoretical expositions of all of its subject matters from a work of this genre.

Facing Forgiveness does, however, progressively develop a fairly systematic and quite detailed exposition of forgiveness and reconciliation, and it challenges its readers to explicitly articulate and modify their beliefs about these matters. This is one of the work’s many strong points, precisely why lack of equally attentive discussion of anger, a “powerful, intense emotion” (64), but also, as some traditional theorists such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas recognized, a complex interpersonal one entwined with considerations of justice, needed at times for attainment or protection of certain goods, and even capable of being virtuous.

The book’s subtitle, speaking of “letting go of anger”, expresses its basic orientation towards the wide range of affects and dispositions set under its rubric. Bitterness, revenge, rage, fury, hostility, and hatred, are all used as synonyms or treated as effects of anger. Wrath gets distinguished from anger, as “a behavior used to express that emotion, a behavior which attacks the other as an enemy,” a characterization which is quite correct in what it says, but which clearly leaves much out of the picture, perhaps for those readers unschooled in moral theology or philosophy, who arguably would need the most to be told that wrath is not merely a behavior, but also a vicious habitual disposition. The central focus of the book is not understanding anger, but undoing the lasting and harmful effects it tends to produce, which block the way towards, but are also undone though forgiveness and reconciliation.

The numerous and specific strengths of the book lie in its discussions of forgiveness and reconciliation. It is structured in short chapters of only a few pages, each discussing a particular subject matter, and ending in questions for personal reflection. The first two chapters draw the reader into the project through having them examine their beliefs about forgiveness, and then recall and reflect upon experiences of forgiveness, of non-forgiveness, of being offended and of forgiving. The bulk of the book’s chapters address the particular subject matters in a progressive manner, and center on individual examples of the subject matter, “put[ting] human faces on a psychological and theological concept."

Each of the examples is well chosen and illustrative of the feature of forgiveness under discussion, and certain of the chapters analyze the examples and their narratives in order to develop important and often overlooked aspects of forgiveness. The reason the authors structured the chapters around these vivid narratives is that people “may not know how to forgive because they lack human models of forgiveness,” so the narratives provide “tangible, concrete models of forgiveness."

The authors both avoid and point out numerous misunderstandings of forgiveness, another strong point of the book. They dispel the “myth that when one truly forgives one will forget," interpreting the counsel to forgive seventy times seven as a call to “recall the hurt and to continually chose to forgive." Another misconception, standing in the way of forgiveness, is “the belief that forgiveness must be communicated to the other and the reconciliation is always a desirable condition." Likewise, the authors stress that forgiveness is not merely a matter of emotions, nor something determined primarily at a cognitive level. It involves the will, and often much struggle to will the ultimately correct decision, but is also “a movement of the heart that involves God rather than just an act of the will.” “Forgiveness is usually a slow process," they remind us, also stressing the importance of “distinguish[ing] between forgiveness and justice,” nothing that “forgiveness does not dissipate the obligation for justice."