The following video is a follow-up to the one I posted last Friday on Forgiveness and Happiness. What I found interesting – and initially almost kept me from posting it – is that it’s barely about forgiveness. In the video, Justin, the host of Soul Pancake’s Science of Happiness series, asks one of the participants if he wants to take the exercise from the experiment – delivering to a mirror the words of forgiveness he’d prepared for his sister – one step further by actually calling her. As he does, you’ll realize it’s not so much that she’s done something wrong, but that he feels bad for being far away and regrets...

Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian faith, and this is never more apparent than during Lent. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, we necessarily reflect on the cross and its relationship to forgiveness. Jesus, we say, quoting Scripture, died for our sins, but exactly what that means can vary from tradition to tradition or, indeed, from Christian to Christian. When I was working on Making Sense of the Cross, I was struck by some of the contested views of the relationship between the cross and forgiveness. The substitutionary theory of atonement, for instance, suggests that the cross is the mechanism by which forgiveness is even...