Spotlighting Amish Grace

When Chuck Colson, a leading figure of the conservative Christian right, and Bill Moyers, a leading figure of the liberal secular left, both choose to positively highlight the same thing, I think it's worth sitting up and taking notice.

That's exactly what's happened with Colson's recent commentary, "The Context of Forgiveness" (mp3) and Moyer's closing monolouge of his Bill Moyer's Journal program, "Bill Moyers on the grace of the Amish" (mov).

Both discuss the new book, "Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy". I think they are both worth listening to/watching, (and the book itself is probably well worth a read) but here's just a snippet from the Colson commentary:

A demented gunman, Charles Roberts, took a school-room full of Amish girls hostage in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Before he killed himself, Roberts had murdered five girls in cold blood.

But as shocking as this senseless act of violence was, it was what followed that sent the real shock waves through the nation.

Within hours of the shooting, several members of the Amish community visited Mrs. Roberts and her family, to express their sorrow over her loss and to say they did not hold anything against them. Another Amish man visited the killer’s father. A Roberts family spokesperson said, “He stood there for an hour, and he held [Mr. Roberts] in his arms and said, ‘We forgive you.’”

...

But the question is, how are we working in our own communities to build cultures of grace? Do we teach our children to forgive? Are we actively working to restore offenders and to reach out in aid to victims? And are we overcoming the evil in the world by good, as we are commanded to?

The Amish have given us a great lesson in the way to defeat hatred and alienation. It is the Christian worldview—the only one that makes such a magnificent response to such a horrible tragedy possible.