Hi everybody, we have something special for you today which is that my brilliant friend and colleague,

the Reverend Dr. Matthew Ijihashi-Pots, wrote,

what I truly believe to be a paradigm shifting theological book called Forgiveness

and Alternative Account. And we thought that we would give you a snippet of this book,

read to you by The Great Matt Pots. Yeah, thanks for giving the opportunity to read some of this

for our audience. This is the only place you can hear me read a portion of the book. And I'm going

to present to you today the very beginning of it, the introduction where I kind of set out the

framework and suggest maybe a little bit of how I want the paradigm to shift and how I want to

rethink forgiveness. Just a warning though, I begin the book and I begin this reading talking about

the Charleston shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church and so there is some description of what

happened that day and a description of some of the violence that was done. So if that's something

that would trigger you, you probably want to avoid this lesson. This is a selection from my new book

Forgiveness and Alternative Account published by Yale University Press.

On June 17th, 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylan Roof walked into

historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and joined

13 others for the Wednesday evening Bible study. He sat next to the pastor, Clemente Pichney,

and listened for a while and then bickered with the group over their interpretation of scripture.

When the congregants brought their heads and began to pray at the close of the study, Roof

Rose withdrew a concealed handgun and began murdering the people who had welcomed him into their

spiritual home. He killed nine members of the congregation and was quickly arrested.

It is a ramement several but not all of the victims surviving family members offered forgiveness

to Roof through a closed circuit television fee to the jail where he had been remanded.

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