The Washington Post highlighted the expertise of UW–Madison’s Robert Enright, a professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, in a story that is headlined, “Moving lessons on forgiveness out of religious spaces and into schools.”
Enright is considered to be one of the founders of the scientific study of forgiveness and last year was lauded as a “game changer” in modern psychology by the American Psychological Association.
The Washington Post explains that Enright is the leader of a team of researchers “who have been developing practical methods for helping young people cultivate forgiveness for more than three decades.” The team’s “workbooks and teacher training programs have been shared with thousands of educators worldwide.”
Enright and his fellow researchers are hoping to normalize the teaching of forgiveness in schools — widening its scope beyond religious settings.
“Enright says that within his field, the idea of teaching forgiveness in nonreligious settings was not immediately accepted,” notes the story.
“When he and his colleagues began looking into forgiveness in the mid-1980s, a religious stigma attached to the subject made it difficult to get funding for research. But resistance from the scientific community gradually faded away, Enright said, as the benefits of forgiveness were empirically demonstrated. There are now well over a thousand scientific papers on the psychological impact of practicing forgiveness, Enright said.”
Check out the full story to learn more about Enright’s research and findings.