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Betting on the truth: Pete Rose's staged confession

What gives a human being the capacity to attend to the truth, and to grow in that capacity?” My friend’s question hung in the air, dangling over the center of the table as those of us in the room found ourselves strangely silent.

The question was left dangling for us because we knew that its presupposition is haunting. Many of us don’t know how to attend to the truth, and too often we lack the capacity even to recognize the truth. Or, put more starkly, the question’s haunting presupposition is that we live in a world of lies.

Kinda sorry: Banal expressions of contrition

The Western world lost much when the confession-absolution dyad dropped God out of the equation. Vanished is the power of the purifying rhetoric that once gave voice to sinners in classic words and acts of contrition and confession. The banal phrases of today’s transgressors, gathered from any recent week’s newspapers or broadcasts, contrast drastically with the language of confession in the classic Book of Common Prayer and the Roman Catholic Act of Contrition, as the following examples show:

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