Act Of Confession Research Articles

“My Version of it Matters Too”: Confession and Identity in Makhosazana Xaba’s Short Story “Behind The Suit”

Makhosazana Xaba’s “Behind The Suit”, a revisioning of Can Themba’s “The Suit”, takes the form of a letter written by Mbatha, ex-lover of Philemon (Themba’s protagonist), to his estranged daughter. In it, he tells her about their ancestors’ lives and he confesses his role in Philemon’s abuse of his wife, Matilda, which eventually led to her suicide. In this article, we examine Mbatha’s attempt to solidify his and his daughter’s sense of self through the act of confession – a confession that is not wholly true. Consequently, Mbatha’s false self prevails. Bearing in mind the dominance of this false self, we pay attention to the significance of the story’s epistolary form – how it enables Mbatha to build a bridge between himself (I) and his daughter (You). The letter also assists Mbatha in locating him and his daughter in time and place through repeated references to their ancestors to Johannesburg and Sophiatown. We determine that, ultimately, Mbatha’s project cannot succeed due either to his unwillingness or inability to access his true self, with the result that the meaningful connection he hopes to have created with his daughter is rendered impossible. In the end, the onus falls on his daughter to locate and assert her own identity through the information given to her in the letter.

The Holy Sinful Church: Towards a More Realistic Catholic Ecclesiology

Abstract This article demonstrates that in Roman Catholic ecclesiology, it would be more justifiable and realistic to fully accept the concept of the sinfulness of the Church as a whole, not only that of its individual members. The piece begins with a short review and commentary on the doctrinal position of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that provides a doctrinal basis for adopting and developing the notion of a ‘sinful Church’. Then, two contemporary activities of the Roman Catholic Church are analysed in which the notion of the ‘sinful Church’ has played an important role: the Great Jubilee act of confession, with the related explanations and commentaries, and the ecumenical dialogue with Lutherans. The final section attempts to formulate some suggestions for a more realistic Catholic ecclesiology involving a ‘relativisation’ of the Church’s salvific mission and a wider use of the Chalcedonian Christological paradigm in ecclesiology.

From confessing to confession: Discerning the season under heaven

This article poses the questions of whether a specific confession of faith is necessary in the church, and, if it is, how a church might discern when a new act of confession may be required. It approaches these issues by reflecting on the act of confessing and on the work of confession. It argues that it is the movement from confessing to confession that enables the church to discern when a situation has been reached when a new confession is required.

Die ökumenischen Potentiale der Theologie Karl Barths. Facetten einer eigenen Konzeptualisierung

Abstract The ecumenical potential of Barth’s theology goes far beyond his direct participation in the ecumenical movement. The denominational character of his theology is always transcended by the act of confession which the church again and again has to formulate anew in its respective time and space. The denominational tradition remains welcome as assistance but can never take the place of the act of confessing. The contextuality of theology is essentially connected to its catholicity. Focusing on the first commandment, Barth reminds us that even the Church itself can succumb to the temptation of filling the place of God with self-imagined gods. The most promising ecumenical potential of Barth’s theology can be found in his Covenant theology according to which - based on his doctrine of election - Israel and the church are inextricably entwined with each other in the one congregation of God. The consequences this implies for ecumenism have yet to be drawn.

Japanese scandals and their ritualization

On the theoretical level, this article aims to connect the theory of ritual and performance to the social phenomenon of media scandal. While focusing on the Japanese mediascape, this article aims to illuminate the ritualized means of scandal resolution, and the cultural realities of public shaming. This is important because most scandal denouements in Japan do not get by without a secular ritual of emotional confession, temporary exclusion, and eventual reintegration. While drawing from the methods of neofunctionalism, it is illustrated how the sociocultural act of confession, apology and exclusion is turned into an orchestrated pseudo-event with a high degree of ritualization.

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse Michael Skafidas (bio) Literary self-expression is as old as literature. Autobiographical poetry, which until now has been an underrepresented research area, constitutes an underlying influence rooted in antiquity. As this article will demonstrate, autofiction—a neologism of the modern era—existed long before Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in the 1970s. The first-person narrative prose is not disengaged from the confessional subtleties of the lyric “I” that preceded it. Distinct though the standards of the two traditions are, they both rely on the authority of subjective experience in personal storytelling. Indeed, as argued by current scholars, autofiction is an intergeneric practice that is already ancient. How ancient? We can detect early traces of the weakening of the boundary between the self and the outside world in the works of Hesiod and in The Homeric Hymns. After them, Sappho appears as an example of an archaic poet whose intimate lyrical confessions generated an autofictional testimony driven by secret passions. In addition, as an early case of an autofictional poet, Sappho demonstrated in her poetry some of the generic features ascribed today to autofiction in that she tended to be both the narrator and the central character in her poems, used her real name, described “daily life often [End Page 85] inventing or modifying certain facts,” and did so “in search not only for truth and justice but for the self” (Tuck 1). Most significantly, I will juxtapose two foundational modern voices whose private and emotional verses, in harmony with Sappho’s unfettered lyricism, conveyed homoerotic desire as a legitimate autobiographical literary theme. As I see it, Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy, two poets standing on the two opposite ends of the world, the old and the new, east and west, in the crossroads of modernity, authored autofictional testimonies of the self and the body that anticipated the psychoanalytic inflections of the twentieth century and depicted desire as the kernel of existence, the “afflatus of the body,” in Whitman’s terms, that surges and surges into memory. Both poets rose above and beyond the general and the impersonal to remember the experience of the body and by doing so they ended up poeticizing the history of their personalities. Unlike autobiography, autofiction accepts the malleability and evasiveness of memory, as well as its inability to “provide an accurate representation of the past, even if identity is constructed largely based on our mnemonic capacity” (Ferreira-Meyers 213). Yet, as poets know since the days of Homer, memory is the ark of lost time, and literature is the art of reviving and exteriorizing memory that contains both fantasy and history. Long before the term was coined, the personal writing of Whitman and Cavafy prefigured the essence of autofiction as a “border area” (cited in Ferreira-Meyers 206), where recollections, fantasies, illusions, aspirations, cultural imagery rooted in the writer take form and content. Cavafy in particular came of age with the determination of the early twentieth century modernist artist to turn the imprecision of memory into the most trustworthy revelation about the meaning of a life lived amidst the negations of modernity. In Whitman’s and Cavafy’s autofictional poems the poets’ recollections form a narrative of confession. In Foucault’s analysis, the act of confession is described as a disclosure of knowledge “extracted from the body” (59). The confessional tone of Whitman and Cavafy and the emotional reciprocity their poems elicit activate the sensory channels of the reader. If reading, as Proust contemplated, is the “urging force” (49) that unlocks the gates of spaces we could not otherwise enter, the enterprise of reading Whitman and Cavafy entails a process of illumination in which the reader intuits feelings, sensations, and spaces previously unknown or beyond reach. Reading the two poets is a sensual act itself; the reader is drawn into a reverie that often awakens private notions of desire, and thus reading [End Page 86] triggers a response to an iconic language that involves both thoughts and senses. In the last section of this essay I will consider the intimacy between autofictional poetry and twentieth-century visual...

Confessing Anthropocene

AbstractWhat is the best way to communicate with far future human (and/or posthuman) societies? This sounds like a question for science fiction, but I ask it in the context of a pressing issue in environmental ethics: the (very) long-term disposal of high-level spent radioactive fuel. To date, the moral justification for burying the waste underground has hinged on the technical possibilities of communicating a message of warning to people living ten thousand years in the future. I argue that the problem with this approach is not only that it insufficiently acknowledges the inevitable failure of the message (though I also consider this); additionally, it serves to mask deeper ethical reflection on the legacy of human life to the deep future. To remedy this, I consider what it would mean to think about deep-future communication as an act of confession. What are the advantages of this category, ethically and politically, over that of warning or instruction? I draw upon the classic theological and philosophical exploration of the confession in that of Saint Augustine and subsequently in Derrida’s mimicking of him, in the light of which I consider the ethics of confession and witness as being haunted by the legacy of one’s actions into deep time. Notwithstanding its critical reception among certain philosophers, a confessing tone may become increasingly pertinent to activists, artists, and faith communities making sense of humanity’s ethical commitments in deep time.

Re-membering Ourselves: Confession as a Pathway to Conscientization

Abstract In her book Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength, Chanequa Walker-Barnes (2014) offers a theological analysis of the myth of the “StrongBlackWoman,” a trope that suggests that black women do not have the same human needs or experience pain like others. Walker-Barnes suggests self-awareness as one of a myriad of interventions to combat the internalization of the StrongBlackWoman myth and the multidimensional manifestations of dis-ease it produces in black women. Offering greater specificity to Walker-Barnes’s strategy, this paper identifies the practice of confession as a strategy of self-awareness that facilitates black women’s capacity for vulnerability. The author employs the theology of feminist theologian Meehyun Chug and reflections of black feminist Audre Lorde to argue that the act of confession operates as a practice of conscientization, or a new, more valid way for black women to discover their feelings and understand their reality. It does so by reconnecting them with their physical and spiritual being, offering a theological reinterpretation of strength that privileges vulnerability and reconciling the dissociated parts of their humanness while embracing a sense of community with God and with others. This intervention takes seriously a womanist ontology of isness, which articulates the coherent and unified relationship between the body and the soul by attending to the inextricable connection between emotional, spiritual, and physical health through the interplay of material, psychological, and spiritual experiences. Through the practice of confession, black women employ the many dimensions of their being to debunk the ideologies of discursive powers that attempt to stifle their well-being. In doing so they establish for themselves, in conjunction with God and community, a more liberating vision of strength.

Zdrada tajemnicy spowiedzi w obowiązującym prawodawstwie kościelnym

Sacrament of penance as a sign of reconciliation between God and man, and exercised in the Church community obliges the minister to the humble and dispositional services to people wishing to experience the Divine Mercy, but it also requires the minister to prudence, sensitivity and delicacy, and above all to maintain absolute secrecy regarding the sins espoused by the penitent. The secret of confession is absolutely inviolable. It derives not only from ecclesiastical law, but above all has a basis in the law of God. Hence the confessor was obliged to secrecy of confession, which applies it to the end of life and does not stop even after the death of the penitent. The seal of confession is protected on one side by prohibiting, under penalty of using the knowledge acquired in the act of confession, followed by non-clerics interviewed as a witness on circumstances learned during confession. On the other hand, secular legislation out of respect for the Church’s canon law incorporates the principles and provisions excludes the possibility of questioning as a witness of the clergy of the facts about which they learned during confession. The entity, which may allow a betrayal of the seal of confession is the only minister of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation, because he owes a duty of confidentiality. Translator or a third-hearing confession by the case are obliged to secrecy of confession. The sacramental may be affected in two ways: either directly or indirectly. Direct betrayal occurs when the minister of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation talking about a specific person mentions the fact that familiar with her confession. Indirect betrayal arises when the confessor reveals the matter of confession, but without disclosing the person of the penitent or vice versa. From the way breach of confidentiality of confession, and thus the gravity of the betrayal of the sacramental seal, the legislature church addicted criminal sanctions. Betrayal of the sacramental seal is a crime for which the canonical penal law provides for appropriate sanctions. Direct betrayal of the seal of confession triggers penalties in the form of a penalty of excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Indirect betrayal, because of the lighter nature of the crime is punishable by an unspecified, appropriate to the gravity and sanity action. Punishable acts consisting of betrayal secret confession barred after ten years from the date of the offense.

Reflection and reflective practice discourses in coaching: a critical analysis

ABSTRACTReflection and reflective practice is seen as an established part of coaching and coach education practice. It has become a ‘taken-for-granted’ part of coaching that is accepted enthusiastically and unquestioningly, and is assumed to be ‘good’ for coaching and coaches. Drawing on sociological concepts, a primarily Foucauldian lens, the purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of reflection and to unpack some of the assumptions underlying it and problematize the seemingly unproblematic. This paper challenges the current dominant cognitive assumptions about reflection (and coaching) as an individual, asocial, ahistorical process and explores through concepts such as power/knowledge, discourse and the self, the extent that reflection is discursive and constructs coaches’ subjectivities. The analysis considers unintended consequences of reflection as a form of surveillance that normalizes coaches’ practices through the act of confession. The paper thus challenges the prevailing descriptions that stress the epistemological, and claim ‘neutral’, discursive-blind and non-political perspectives.

Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness Claire Sponsler Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. By Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011; pp. 232. In the crowded field of Shakespeare studies, Sarah Beckwith has found an opening on two seldom-linked fronts. This study makes a new contribution both to studies of the enduring, universal, themes in Shakespeare’s works, and to studies of the specific cultural and historical contexts that shaped his writings. The theme in question is forgiveness, and the cultural and historical context is that of early modern views on repentance. In addition to its bold synthesizing of two approaches that are usually kept separate, what sets this book apart is Beckwith’s expertise as a scholar of medieval theatre and religious culture whose work has played a major role in breaking down the rigid periodization that has—with historical inaccuracy and critical unhelpfulness—long severed the medieval from the early modern. Any understanding of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s plays, as Beckwith convincingly shows, has to reckon with the continuities with, as well as the breaks from, older doctrines of penance that were fundamental to late medieval religion. Four plays are at the heart of this book: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. That all four were written after the great tragedies, and are thus “post-tragic,” is crucial to Beckwith’s claims about them, since in her reading, all four hold out the possibility of a redemption unavailable to Shakespeare’s tragic figures. While figures like King Lear are locked into the irreversible consequences of their passions and behaviors, penitence and repentance become the means by which Shakespeare’s posttragic heroes and heroines find forgiveness and, through forgiveness, a return to the human community—or what Beckwith calls “acknowledgement.” As Beckwith notes, the sacrament of penance was the medieval location of the language of acknowledgment, especially through the act of confession. In the late romances, the language of acknowledgment develops in the absence of the auricular confession and priestly absolution that for some 300 years had shaped penance, but that by Shakespeare’s time had been rejected by reformers, who in its place offered up (although far from neatly) repentance understood not as an outward ceremony, but as a turning of the self toward God. Beckwith traces the controversies over the components of the sacrament of penance—contrition, confession, and absolution—in order to map the contours of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s late plays. Changes in the status of penance and repentance were bound up with changing forms and conventions of speaking, as a whole range of speech acts, such as confessing, absolving, blessing, and baptizing, among others, were transformed by the English Reformation. Shakespeare’s plays, Beckwith argues, chart this revolution in language, including instances in which the authority of the speech acts of the priesthood was undermined and replaced by the claims of everyone for authority over human relations. In Beckwith’s view, the result is a new forging of bonds of community, which lacking other foundation had to be continually remade through conversation. For Shakespeare, Beckwith claims, human speech is what makes or breaks the ties among people, hence the “grammar” of the book’s title, which points to the relations among words linked to the sacrament of penance and makes a connection between the practices of ordinary language philosophy and the theatre, both of which understand language as situation and as act. After a section charting transformations in the language of forgiveness following the abolition of the sacrament of penance, the book’s second section offers a reading of promises and marriage in Measure for Measure, before turning in the third section to an analysis of forgiveness as an act of community in the four late romances. While a discussion of promises might seem out of place in a study of forgiveness, it fits with the book’s reliance on speech-act theory as a methodology and looks forward to the later plays, in which marriage turns less on issues of future promises than on forgiveness of past actions. Beckwith’s aim, when she takes up the four late romances, is to explore how Shakespeare treats...

The Theology of Poems on the Lord's Supper by the Dutch Calvinist, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687)

AbstractIn this article, I provide a detailed analysis of the poems on the Lord's Supper by the Dutch statesman and man of letters, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687). Between 1642 and 1684, he wrote eighteen poems on this subject, sixteen in Dutch and two in Latin. The type of poem varies from pithy epigrams to sonnets, through to longer poems over fifty lines in length, replete with well-conceived poetic tropes. To date, these poems have received little scholarly attention. Huygens was a lifelong member of the Reformed church and his poetry considers themes which are central to Reformed theology, such as human sin, divine grace and human gratitude. In his poetry, he recognises that he is a sinner and that it is not sufficient merely to ask for divine forgiveness, and then sin again. He acknowledges the need to intend to change his ways, but also recognises that he can only do this with divine assistance. Huygens published most of these poems and although such a public acknowledgement of sin may seem strange to us, there is a sense in which he was performing a public act of confession, to make common cause with his fellow believers, and also perhaps to encourage them to do the same. Much of the poetry considers the ontology and efficacy of the Lord's Supper. As well as exploring familiar tropes such as the sacrament as a feast and a pledge for God's promises, Huygens also asks about the very nature of the bread and wine of the sacrament. We might expect him to ascribe little or no value to the elements themselves, beyond, to use Brian Gerrish's phrase, ‘presenting what they represent’. poetry. However, at some points, the language Huygens uses to refer to the elements, such as ‘holy bread’ and ‘healing dew’, suggests something more is at stake. Some may dismiss such phrases as mere lyrical flourish, but I argue that they point to a central tension inherent within Reformed eucharistic theology between sign and signified and, furthermore, that this poetry offers us the opportunity to explore that tension. Huygens’ poems bear comparison with the best English-language religious poetry of the seventeenth century, and remind us that poetry as well as prose can offer us valuable theological insight.

Memoir as suicide

Anecdotal by necessity, this essay through an act of confession considers the advantages and disadvantages of memoir as a genre for the contemporary writer who is also an academic. Employing the ruminative techniques of the lyric essay in order to question the reliance of confessional prose on anecdotal narrative, the prose style deliberately mingles genres in fragments that attempt both to stalk the subject - confessional ethics - and to free it from a narrative entrapment where content is supreme to textual expression. Considering also the notion of creative writing as therapy, and the vanity of the self-directed gaze, any resolutions are avoided as intimacies reveal the thorny negotiations of writing and revelation.

Speaking for the Perpetrator: Whiteness and Sexuality in Alan Paton’s "Too Late the Phalarope"

Confessional narratives, both in fiction and in political discussions, deal withthe past in very distinctive ways. A confession is retroactive, and the narrative is shaped by the wrongdoing, which is to be disclosed. It constructs an opposition between evil as a hidden secret and confession as openness and awareness of past wrong. Accordingly, the act of confession in itself signals a move away from ‘evil’ towards ‘good.’ This genre also defines the speaker in interesting ways. The protagonist of a confession is most often also its narrator. It is through the act of placing oneself within a retrospective narrative that the move from ‘evil’ to ‘good’ is made possible. The speaking subject thus grants himself or herself the power to return to his or her own history with the purpose of disclosing actions that he or she has previously kept hidden. In this way the genre also demands a considerable distance between protagonist and narrator. The distance is achieved through the act of disclosure itself, by speaking out and opening up the past and, in the process, by defining oneself as a perpetrator.

The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics

This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community, and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations and international mobile individuals.

Miranda: the story of America's right to remain silent

Whether innate or acquired early in life, the desire to confess---to take responsibility for a perceived misdeed---is no doubt a deep-seated impulse in us all; perhaps we want, as Sartre suggests, to return the world to a “harmony of minds,” an agreement on the principles that bind us to the society in which we live. Why we wish to do this seems visceral, as immutable as physical law, and as basic to our sense of justice as the concept of right and wrong. The act of confession, it would seem, restores the world (and our psyches) to a state of balance: For every action there must be an equal reaction---an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Confess, and all will be forgiven---this is what the police interrogator conveys to the suspect. Not in so many words, but the message is there---in the tone of voice, in the proffered kindness of a cigarette or cup of coffee---and in truth the suspect will be forgiven by the cop, whose only real requirement for achieving harmony is the confession. For the higher authority, however, the admission of wrongdoing is not the end. The ancient god of retribution must be served; the wrongdoer must pay for what he did, with his wealth, his liberty, or his life.

Que me veux-tu?/ What do you want of me?: Claude Cahun's Autoportraits and the Process of Gender Identification

This essay explores the early twentieth century self-portraits of the French surrealist photographer Claude Cahun. Critics have claimed that Cahun's numerous and varied autoportraits reveal a woman in the midst of a gender identity crisis. This article argues that her extensive oeuvre does not suggest an individual identity crisis, as much as it deconstructs the process of gender identification in Cahun's contemporary culture. The title of Cahun's collection of poetry and photomontage from 1930, Aveux non avenus (translated as cancelled confessions) serves as the impetus for an analysis of self-portraiture as an act of confession. Several photographs are examined through the theoretical lens of gaze theory; the writings of Joan Rivière and Jacques Lacan help expose and interpret the viewer's unstable, and often times uneasy, relationship to Cahun's art.

Cyprian's Reconstruction of the Martyr Tradition

Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

Confession and Confessions

This paper addresses some fundamental theological questions about the nature and function of creeds and confessions in the life of the church. The basic positive claim here is that creeds and confessional formulae properly emerge out of one of the primary and defining activities of the church, the act of confession. In that act, which is constantly to characterize the life of the church, the church binds itself to the gospel. Confession is the act of astonished, fearful and grateful acknowledgment that the gospel is the one word by which to live and die; in making its confession, the church lifts up its voice to do what it must do—speak with amazement of the goodness and truth of the gospel and the gospel's God. Creeds and confessional formulae exist to promote that act of confession: to goad the church towards it, to shape it, to tie it to the truth, and so to perpetuate the confessional life and activity of the Christian community. In this way, creeds and confessional formulae are the servants of the gospel in the church.

Calvijn en de biecht

Calvin and the act of confession In 1540 Calvin declared that no member of the congregation would be allowed to take part in the ceremony of Holy Communion unless this ritual had been preceded by the act of confession. With this declaration Calvin, however, aimed to urge and encourage his fellow-believers to scrutinize their religious lifestyle on a disciplined and regular basis. Calvin regarded confession as a pastoral aid and an embodiment of compassion and admonition. Simultaneously it could also serve as a measure of social control. In this article the author consecutively outlines the practice of confession in medieval times and the way in which confession was implemented as a disciplinary device. In conclusion it is stated that, in line with the view point of the Reformation, Calvin allowed the members of the congregation the freedom to confess to fellow members. He, however, also stressed the importance and obligation to allow members of the consistory – and especially the minister – to investigate the condition of one’s religious lifestyle. Self-investigation should be coupled with regular house visitation in order to ascertain the quality of believers’ religious lives.