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The purpose of this article is to elicit understanding of how forgiveness, religion and spirituality, and relationships can better our lives. It draws from the life of Everett L. Worthington, Jr, a positive psychologist and Commonwealth Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has published almost 50 books and over 500 scholarly articles or chapters.

This is a case study, followed by a ten-question interview. The core methodology is positive autoethnography which is embraced by Worthington to reveal life lessons from things he has done.

Worthington reveals a life honoring the interwoven lives of people. He has studied forgiveness intensively and finds it to be an essential way of making our way in the world and in a world community that all too often hosts hurt.

An extensive literature has developed to understand what forgiveness is, how it comes about naturally and how the REACH Forgiveness method can help people who struggle to forgive themselves or others, and do it more quickly, thoroughly and frequently. Forgiving has psychological, social, spiritual and physical benefits to the forgiver.

This article is filled with practical information on how to forgive and how to pursue eudaemonia, which Worthington defines as virtue for oneself.

Forgiveness has widespread social implications. Good relationships are those that can help form, maintain, grow and repair when damaged close emotional bonds. Forgiveness helps repair, maintain and grow those bonds.

Worthington has been instrumental in the establishment and growth of the subfield of forgiveness studies and in the study of humility.

This chapter is based on research conducted in Sweden with young sports-active children participating in non-elite sports. The main focus was to explore the phenomenon of emotional abuse of children in sport from the perspective of the children and young athletes. The study is theoretically grounded in the new sociology of childhood and draws inspiration from the theory of different sports worlds within children's sport. This chapter explores young athletes perspectives about how negative emotions arise from emotionally abusive interactions during sports practice and the resulting effects on the child. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 15 girls and boys aged 12–18 involved in gymnastics, swimming, floorball, football and volleyball. The study found that emotional abuse takes different forms and involves both peers and coaches, often occurring in situations where the young athletes’ sport performance is displayed and evaluated. The emotionally abusive behaviour seems to have a range of harmful effects for the child. This chapter adds to the existing literature by examining how emotional abuse is expressed and experienced within non-elite youth sports, what forms of interaction contribute to the experience of negative emotions and what harmful effects it may have.

There appears to be a linear (although by no means perfect) relationship between the amount of time children spend with adults in sport settings and the harms experienced by so many young athletes. Children who are professional or national team athletes, and those in the pipeline towards professional and high performance sport, are likely to spend the greatest amounts of time with adults in those sport settings.

This chapter outlines how sport participation has become so work-like for so many children who demonstrate talent in a sport. This can reach a point where some young athletes under the age of 18, or even under the age of 16, spend more time with coaches and training for sport than they spend in school or with their parents. Critiques of the system of early talent identification/early specialisation/intensive training and competition for children are followed by a summary of the types of harms experienced by children in that system.

The specificity of sport and the autonomy of sport organisations protects those organisations from responsibility or blame for the harms experienced by children. This chapter concludes with a call to exempt children from the autonomy of sport organisations and to establish recognition of children as a protected class in sports.

In this chapter, we consider the origins of research on abuse in sport and its current positioning within the wider field of sport science and sport sociology. First, we look at specific challenges faced by pioneering researchers in this field through a discussion of Celia Brackenridge's early work and the resistance she faced from both the UK sport sector and academia. Second, we consider the manner in which the sport sector responded to the issue of child abuse, and the extent to which ‘safeguarding’ has been integrated into the structural fabric of sport. We then review the current positioning of research on child abuse and safeguarding in the context of wider sports science and sports sociology. We conclude that the topic has frequently been omitted from the thematic canon of social sciences in sport and has only recently been addressed, in a substantive fashion, within basic textbooks of sport sociology. Finally, this chapter highlights the critical potential of sociologically informed research on child maltreatment and abuse in sport.

Unwanted sexual attention in sport can disrupt youth's wholehearted engagement in the activity and threaten their sense of belonging. Remaining attuned to youth sport as a distinctive yet diverse field of practice, in this chapter, we explore the types of sexual violations youths experience across sport settings, the social and situational dynamics at play and how girls and boys make sense of their experiences. Based on a subset of data from a representative survey of high school students in Norway (aged 16–19, n = 7,482), we analyse 308 short textual descriptions from youths who reported exposure to sexual violations in sport in the past year regarding what happened, where the incident took place and who was involved. Our analysis identifies and conceptualises five types of sexual violation experiences: (1) sexualised foul play, (2) sexualised sideline commentary, (3) sexualised body shaming, (4) sexualised body focus and (5) sexualised attention at the gym. These violation types shed new light on the prevalence of and gender patterns in sexual violations in youth sport. Drawing on Jaeggi's relational perspective on social practice, we discuss how sexual violations in sport can affect both youths' relation to sport and youth sport as a field of practice. We suggest that sexual violations in sport can be viewed as gendered mechanisms of alienation that narrow the diversity of participants and further align youth sport with the values and practices of elite sport.

Sport is acknowledged for fostering positive competencies, behaviours and attitudes contributing to individuals' social and physical well-being and development. However, recent research suggests that athletes may face adverse effects on their health, safety and well-being due to violence against them. Numerous studies highlight that athletes across various sports endure physical, sexual and emotional violence. Given the pervasive nature and severity of such violence, understanding athletes' widespread tolerance for these experiences is crucial. This chapter employs figurational sociology to analyse violence against athletes, specifically exploring how violence and abuse in sport tends to become normalised. By placing a strong emphasis on the interdependence of individuals and their actions within social networks, figurational sociology highlights how abuse in sport is influenced by the relationships and interactions between athletes, coaches and other actors, such as medical staff, peers and parents. Moreover, through the analysis of dynamic power relations across various actors and the role of habitus, this sociological perspective offers valuable insights into the dynamics of abuse in sport.