Shame Was Never Just Yours: The Forgotten Ceremony
Jazz, Shame, and Being With #14
Dear friends—
Here’s the short version: shame was never just yours. It is the signal system of belonging itself, and every community you and I inhabit runs machinery for marking people — while hardly any still remembers its machinery for welcoming them back. This essay is about that missing ceremony.
The last two essays traced captivity to shame inside a single body — the verdict, the discharge, the foreclosed return, and the love that keeps arriving anyway. With this one, the series turns a corner: the same captivity, now at the scale of congregations, professions, and the feeds we scroll. You don’t need the earlier essays to enter here; this one carries what you need.
And one thing before we begin: if you carry a mark of your own — something a community has never shown you how to put down — this essay was written with you especially in mind. It is hard on our institutions and gentle with you.
The story starts in front of a television.
The ninety-second ceremony
When I was a boy, a man was destroyed in my living room every week, and I never missed it.
The show was called Branded — Chuck Connors as Captain Jason McCord, forty-eight episodes that first aired before I was old enough to follow them and that I caught later, in reruns, the way boys of my generation caught everything. Every episode opened the same way, and the opening was the whole show. A fort courtyard. Drums. The commanding officer stepping down the line to where McCord stands at attention, and then, in front of the assembled community, the ceremony: the buttons sliced off his tunic one by one, the epaulettes ripped away, the saber broken over the knee and flung in the dirt at his feet. Then the gates of the fort swing shut behind him — banishment made architecture — and a voice sings the question the whole series lived inside: “What do you do when you’re branded, and you know you’re a man?”
Ninety seconds, start to finish. I watched a community compress a whole man into a single word — coward — rerun after rerun on afternoon television, years before I understood what I was seeing.1 (The sequence survives on YouTube, if you want to feel it in your body rather than take my word:)
Here is the detail I want you to hold. The accusation was false. McCord was no coward; he kept silent to shield a man who could not bear the truth being told. And it did not matter — not to the fort, not to any town he wandered into afterward. The mark, not the fact, was what everyone stored. Readers of this series will recognize the gap between the verdict and the man, because we spent two essays inside it.
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But there is a second detail, and it took me decades to see it. The ceremony only ran one direction. The fort owned magnificent machinery for putting the mark on — the drums, the witnesses, the broken saber. It owned nothing for taking the mark off. No ritual existed anywhere in that world for revisiting the verdict. Which is why the series could run at all: a man with a mark and no ceremony for its removal can only wander. If any town had owned the counter-rite, the show would have ended in one episode.
I did not know it then, but I was being catechized.2
The arithmetic
A few months ago I started counting.
Not abstractly — I ran the count on the communities I actually inhabit. The church I have served most of my adult life. The scholars and readers I write for. The feed I scroll like everyone else. In each one I counted the rituals that put a mark on a person: the exposure, the trial, the pile-on, the vote, the announcement that someone is no longer welcome here. They were not hard to find.
Then I counted the rituals that take the mark back — public, witnessed acts that declare, with the same energy and the same communal weight: the debt is paid, the person is restored, the episode is over.
I did not like the arithmetic. I still don’t, and one of the places it stung most was my own memory, which is where this essay is eventually headed. But to say why the count frightens me, I have to go back to what shame actually is — and to a promissory note from the last two essays that now comes due.
You were never a self by yourself
Essays 12 and 13 walked through captivity to shame inside one nervous system: the verdict pronounced on the self, the Hinge that relocates the unbearable feeling onto someone else, the foreclosed channel that cannot receive love even when love is offered. I drew that anatomy one body at a time, because that is how we meet it — one body at a time, usually our own. But I keep catching myself, even now, treating shame as something that happens inside people. And the science I have been leaning on all along quietly refuses that picture.
The brain, neuroscience keeps insisting, is a social organ — built and rebuilt across what Louis Cozolino calls the social synapse: the space between us, the medium through which separate nervous systems shape one another.3Dave Matthews was singing about the same medium, I think, in the song whose title says it plainly — “The Space Between” — where the gap between two people is not a void but the place the bond actually lives, “the space we’ll fill with time.”4
A century ago Charles Cooley described the machinery from the inside: I imagine how I appear to you; I imagine your judgment of that appearance; and I feel something about it. That is not a poetic flourish. It is a description of a process running, mostly below awareness, in every human encounter you will have today.5
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I notice I can hold that fact two ways, depending on the morning. On a steady day it is the most reassuring thing I know — that I was never as alone inside my own skin as shame kept telling me. On a harder day it is the most exposing — that there is no private room in me other people did not help build. Both are true. Which is why, the longer I sit with the science, the less it reads to me like information and the more it reads like a doctrine of creation.6
Which means the shame we anatomized in Essays 12 and 13 was never a private malfunction inside an isolated individual. It was a social organ misfiring — or rather, firing exactly as formed, inside relationships that taught it what to expect.7
If the self was never solitary, then the diagnosis cannot stop at the self. So this essay begins the scaling: from one nervous system to the social bond. In the essays that follow, to a whole people.
The instrument panel
The scholar who taught me to see shame at this scale is a sociologist named Thomas Scheff, who spent a career gathering up a hundred years of scattered research that kept discovering the same thing and kept failing to found a tradition. His synthesis reframed everything I thought I knew. Shame, it turns out, is not one unpleasant emotion among many. It is the bond affect — the large family of feelings (embarrassment, humiliation, feeling foolish, rejected, inadequate) that monitors the state of our connection to others, evoked, Scheff says, by even “the slightest threat” to the bond.8 Where fear tracks danger to the body, shame tracks danger to belonging — the same signal this series first learned to call a gift. It is how the body keeps the books on whether it still belongs.
Three of his findings give this teeth, and each one unsettled me more than the last.
First: shame is everywhere, and nearly silent. Picture the study that convinced me. Researchers combing psychotherapy transcripts, hour after hour, coding every flicker of feeling in the room — and finding markers of shame outnumbering every other emotion. Then the stranger finding: it was almost never named. Not by the patients. Not by the therapists.9 The affect suppresses its own naming, because to say “I am ashamed” is to expose the very thing shame exists to hide. Scheff adds the historical register, drawing on Norbert Elias’s history of manners: modernity progressively drove shame out of polite speech, and its power grew precisely as it disappeared from the vocabulary.10
Second: the fork. What matters is never whether shame occurs — it always occurs; that is just the monitor doing its work — but what happens next. Acknowledged shame — felt, named, allowed to pass between people — discharges, and strengthens the bond. This is the ordinary repair cycle of every durable relationship you have — the most ordinary miracle we perform, and most of us learned it without being taught: the apology that lands, the look that says we are all right again, the meal after the argument.
Unacknowledged shame converts. Helen Block Lewis found it first in the clinic, and Scheff generalized it: the shame–rage feeling trap, where bypassed shame turns to anger, the anger is itself shaming, and the loop feeds on its own exhaust — hostility that can run for minutes or for decades.11 If you read Essay 12, you have already met this machine at the person scale. The trap is the Hinge’s interpersonal miniature. It is the reason discharge repeats rather than terminates.
Third: the monitor is anticipatory and constant. We do not merely feel shame after failures; we steer by the anticipation of it, continuously, in every social calculation we make. And anything that pervasive and that unspeakable is going to organize what a community does — and it will never once appear in the minutes.
One discipline, before I scale up
Before the first collective claim, I want to state a rule plainly and then trust it for the rest of this run: there is no group mind. A community does not have a nervous system; it has thousands of them. When I say, in this essay and the ones that follow, that shame regulates a community, I mean that many bodies, each running the monitor I just described, are cued the same way at the same time — and that communities build institutions that pattern what all those bodies do at the fork. The mechanisms are individual; the synchronization and the institutions are shared.
That is the whole metaphysics, and notice: it is scarier than a group mind, not tamer. There is no beast to slay that is not made of neighbors.
Two ways to shame
I keep expecting the science to run out — for the pattern I found in one nervous system to stop scaling. It doesn’t. What Scheff found in the dyad, an Australian criminologist named John Braithwaite found in whole societies, and this is where my count acquired its vocabulary. His classic Crime, Shame and Reintegration asks why some societies reintegrate their deviants while others manufacture criminal careers — and his answer is that communities institutionalize one side or the other of Scheff’s fork.
Reintegrative shaming condemns the act while holding on to the person. Braithwaite finds four features, each doing real work: disapproval aimed at the deed, not the identity; a terminus — the shaming ends; bonds maintained throughout — the person is never expelled from the moral community even while being confronted; and a ceremony of reacceptance — forgiveness enacted, not merely felt, so that everyone knows the episode is closed.12
Before you file that under exotic anthropology, notice where you have seen it: competent family life. Good parents do this daily — disapproval inside unbroken love, ending in restoration. Readers of Essay 13 will recognize the structure; it is marked mirroring applied to moral failure.
Stigmatization — disintegrative shaming — inverts every feature. The person is the deviance. The mark is permanent. The bond is severed. There is no road back. And its signature product is what Braithwaite calls master status: the compression of a whole person into a single deviant identity. “Criminal.” “Racist.” “Apostate.” “Deplorable.” Once the label is the person, the community’s work is done and the person’s options collapse.13
There, decades after the fact, was the word for what those ninety seconds of television taught me weekly: coward as master status, the man gone, the mark walking around in his clothes.
And stigma is productive — this is Braithwaite’s sharpest empirical point. Outcasts do not evaporate; they find each other. The stigmatized form subcultures organized around the rejected identity, which then confirm the community’s worst predictions about them. The theory predicts, with uncomfortable precision, phenomena the church now watches daily: the ex-evangelical networks, the “deconstruction” communities, the LGBTQ+ church refugees — populations formed not by unbelief but by expulsion, gathering exactly as Braithwaite says the stigmatized gather.
Excommunication does not produce repentance. It produces diaspora.14
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Two conditions govern which side of the fork a community institutionalizes. The first is interdependency: reintegration requires people bound together tightly enough that both the shaming and the reacceptance can actually be delivered — which is why the anonymous suburb, the megachurch of strangers, and the online crowd are structurally incapable of reintegrative shaming regardless of their intentions. They can wound. They have no apparatus to restore.
The second is communitarian culture: societies that treat dependency as loyalty rather than weakness shame more than individualist ones — and stigmatize less.
Braithwaite’s exhibit is Japan: the police-station chief who resigns over his constable’s misdeed; a moral idiom — the mushi, the “bug” that acted, not the man — that condemns the act while exonerating the person. The captivity, not the captive, in a criminological register this series has been speaking all along. (The Japan ethnography is contested and dated in places; I am leaning on the mechanism, not the travelogue.)15
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That is a lot of ground in a few pages — two bodies of research and a television western. Before we go on, it may help to remember the question underneath all of it: when one of us fails, what does the community do next — and does the episode ever get to end? You don’t need to hold the vocabulary; I’ll carry it from here. With that question in hand, we can go back to the count.
The missing ceremony
So now run my count with Braithwaite’s vocabulary. Every society runs what the sociologists call degradation ceremonies — public rituals that confer deviant status: the arrest, the trial, the exposure, the pile-on, the expulsion vote, the announcement that someone “is no longer welcome here.”16 We are fluent in that grammar; most of us learned it before we could name it. My question is the other column. Where are the decertification ceremonies — the public rituals that take the deviant status back? Rituals with the same energy, the same publicity, the same communal weight, that declare: the debt is paid, the person is restored, the episode is over.17
Run the audit on the communities you actually inhabit — congregation, profession, feed — and see if your arithmetic beats mine. The West is degradation-rich and decertification-poor. We did not lose our nerve for judgment. We kept the judgment — and lost the nerve for mercy it was supposed to serve. And I cannot exempt my own house.
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The oldest reacceptance technology in Western culture is not the church’s but Israel’s. Leviticus gives the outcast a way back. The one shut outside the camp — clothes torn, crying “Unclean” — is brought home by a public rite in which the priest goes out to him, the community coming to the marked one rather than waiting to be crawled back to; and the rite ends not by merely readmitting him but by restoring him as if they were consecrating a priest.18
The church’s confession and absolution — penance completed and declaredcompleted — inherited that grammar19 rather than inventing it, and our common life has let the inheritance wither into private murmur, or dropped it entirely.
Braithwaite, no churchman, points at the loss directly: he roots reintegrative shaming in “hate the sin, love the sinner,” and observes that the Prodigal Son is “hardly one of our leading folk heroes.”20 That parable even stages the ceremony the fort refused: the father calls for the robe, the ring, the sandals — a reinvestiture, the exact inverse of the buttons and epaulettes and saber stripped from McCord in the courtyard.
Meanwhile the most robust surviving decertification liturgy in American life may be the AA meeting: a room where the worst thing about you is speakable, where the speaking binds you to the room rather than expelling you from it, and where the long-sober stand as living proof that the status is revocable.
There is a philosophical reason the answer has to be a ceremony, and not merely a changed opinion, and it is worth one paragraph of your patience. Acknowledgment, Stanley Cavell taught, goes beyond knowledge precisely “in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.” A community that merely concludes a person is restored has known something; only a community that enacts the restoration has acknowledged it.21 The run’s own tradition said it first, in its own idiom: belief itself, Richard Hooker held, “consisteth not so much in knowledge as in acknowledgement.”22 Restoration that is known but never performed is not restoration. It is a verdict quietly commuted while the prisoner is left in the cell.
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I have to own this one from the inside, because the confusion Cavell is describing is my own besetting habit — and not only mine. I come from people who could dismiss a stranger with a single accurate sentence and feel, in the naming, like prophets — and who had, I have no doubt, been named that way themselves. I learned the trick young: to study a person, to find the exact word for what is wrong with them, and to mistake that exactness for love. It is easier to be right about someone than to be with them; easier to hand across an accurate description than to offer myself. But an accurate description, set down in front of a person who was hoping to be received, is not a gift. It is a mark — a master status made of true things — and the one who receives it can feel, exactly, the difference between being studied and being loved.
What I am really doing, when I reach for the word instead of the welcome, is fleeing the demands of grace and mercy under cover of telling the truth. I revere Valjean and keep behaving like Javert: I say I believe in the candlesticks, in the verdict that can be lifted, and then I reach for the file. This is the habit my family handed me, and the thing I most need to stop getting wrong.
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There is a shadow on this, and honesty requires naming it: a rite can be enacted and still go hollow — performed so long by rote that the people enacting it have forgotten what it enacts. I have felt that emptiness at weddings and baptisms and confirmations, and it should be named, not pretended away. But named precisely: the hollowness is ours, not the rite’s. The grace a true ceremony carries does not wait on our sincerity, nor earn its place by the good it does us; it is the Spirit’s to give, and the Spirit gives it.23
What fails is not the ceremony and not the grace, but our reception. The Spirit does not wait for our attention; the homecoming arrives on time.24Everything happens — and we sleep through our own absolution.
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And modernity has produced a refinement of the one-way ceremony that I find crueler than the fort gates. The fort, whatever else it did, declared itself: McCord knew what had happened, in front of whom, and when it was over. We flatter ourselves that we have outgrown the fort’s cruelty. We have outgrown only its honesty.
The contemporary institution often holds no ceremony at all. It simply stops. The calls are not returned; the invitations dry up; the person is expelled without anyone ever having to say so, which means there is no terminus even to the expulsion — nothing to appeal, nothing to complete, nothing to outlive. If that has ever happened to you, you know something else the theory only gestures at: a verdict nobody pronounces is a verdict nobody can revoke.25
I have been on the receiving end of the difference, and I suspect you have too. There is a specific loneliness in being forgiven in someone’s heart but never in their voice — in sensing that the case against you has quietly been dropped, and still waiting for the sentence that says so out loud, the one that never quite comes. Being known is not yet being received; the body keeps the two accounts separately, and it can always tell which one is empty.26
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Braithwaite says the outcasts find each other, and mostly they do. But some never make it to the diaspora. Some people, when they fail — or believe they have failed — do the expelling themselves. They stop answering the people who love them. They stay away from the table, the reunion, the phone. Not because anyone turned them away, but because they are certain someone will, and they cannot bear to stand there while it happens. So they leave first.
When shame runs that deep, the community never has to lift a finger. The sentence gets carried out anyway — daily, by the person alone, with an imagined verdict standing in for a real one that was never spoken. And notice what has quietly gone missing from that picture: there was no ceremony. No one ever said, “You are no longer welcome here.” Which means no one can ever say the words that reverse it. A person can serve years of a sentence that nobody ever pronounced.
Sometimes it is worse, because two communities are involved. One hands you the failure — the training that ended, the position lost, the marriage, the vows. The other — the family, the tradition, the culture that raised you — taught you long ago what such a failure costs, and the price it taught you was everything. Neither one thinks the road back is its job to build. So there is no road. And yet the word itself remembers the way: teshuvah, Israel’s term for repentance, does not mean serve your sentence — it means turn back, come home.
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If any of this is your story, hear what this essay is actually saying about you. It is not saying you failed too badly to return.27 It is saying that your communities lost the ceremony for return — and that the silence you have been reading as a final verdict is not a verdict at all. It is the sound of machinery no one remembers how to run. The voices that condemn you every day are speaking with borrowed authority. Nobody gave it to them.
The feed, by contrast, is a degradation machine with no reverse gear: its shaming is public, permanent, relationship-free, and aimed at identity — stigmatizing by every one of Braithwaite’s criteria, structurally incapable of the fourth feature. No terminus, no bond, no way back. The feed never forgets, which means the feed is the mark; the archive does the community’s remembering, and the archive does not do ceremonies.
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If you practice medicine or therapy, none of this is new terrain — you have been walking this fork your whole career, whether or not anyone named it for you. Every diagnosis does one of two things. It can swallow the person — the overdose in bed six, the noncompliant one in four — a label doing the work Braithwaite calls master status, the whole human being compressed into the chart’s worst word.
Or it can do the opposite: name the condition as one thing a larger person is carrying, so that the person can be helped to carry it. Same information. Opposite outcomes. Your professions have spent two generations learning that difference the hard way.
And here is the hopeful part: some of those professions have actually rebuilt the road back. A physician whose license is suspended while she gets treatment can, in most of this country, complete a monitored recovery program and be restored to practice — publicly, in writing, with a date on it.28 Whatever else one says about licensing boards, they hold something the wider culture has lost: a working procedure for taking a mark back off. The rest of our common life has barely started.
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The forgetting, though, goes deeper than the withered confessional — and here I have to tell you about the church’s attic, because I taught this history for years and it still ambushed me.
Take Confirmation, the rite most of us now meet as the thing the church does with its teenagers — I prepared those classes myself, year after year, and taught it more or less as the commencement exercise it has become. But the first time the church’s Latin applied “confirm” to any rite — Leo the Great’s rulings, in the 450s — it named a welcome-back: the bishop’s hands laid, with prayer for the Holy Spirit, on people being received into the eucharistic fellowship whose baptisms had happened outside it.29
In the same era the church reconciled its public penitents by the same grammar — penance completed, the bishop’s hands, the return to the table. And when Faustus of Riez gave the West the noun “confirmation” a generation later, he defined it as strengthening: “we are reborn in baptism for life; we are confirmed after baptism for the strife” — the Spirit’s reinforcement for a person who will need it to keep the vows just made.30
Somewhere in the church’s attic, in other words, sits decertification machinery of the highest ceremonial grade — a bishop, a prayer for strength, a public restoration to the table.
The apparatus did not fail. It was reassigned, and its original job forgotten.
It is still on the books, too. The disciplinary rubrics sit in the front matter of my own prayer book, and they read like Braithwaite drafted them: exclusion from the table “intended to encourage repentance and not meant to be a punishment”; the terminus written directly into the sentence — until there is “clear proof of repentance and amendment of life,” until restitution is made or at least promised; communion denied to the stubborn and the unforgiving, granted to those who “desire and promise to make up for their faults”; and penitents at the point of death never, ever refused.31
Disapproval of the deed, a terminus, the bond held, the reacceptance enacted — all four features, encoded in a living rubric. The church’s own glossary appends the quiet epitaph: in pastoral practice, rarely used.
One machine, two operators
One more thing before this run goes anywhere near politics — and it is headed there. This is a discipline I am setting for myself now, so that it governs everything that follows.
The fork does not map onto the political spectrum. Disintegrative shaming is currently practiced with equal fluency by the movement that stigmatizes outsiders — the migrant, the elite, the apostate — and by the movement that stigmatizes insiders: the insufficiently pure ally, the person whose decade-old sentence is excavated for the pile-on, the confession that can never end in absolution. Both run master status. Both lack ceremonies of reacceptance. Both manufacture the subcultures of their outcasts. Each is certain it is the cure for the other.
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That is a claim about one shared psychology — not about one shared moral situation, and not about one shared measure of power. What each movement shames for, and what each can bring to bear, differ in ways that matter, and later essays keep those differences sharp. The symmetry is mechanical: one machine, two operators.
One may command the state, the courts, the border; the other, the platform and the pile-on. A shared mechanism across so uneven a field is not equivalence — and mistaking the one for the other would be a failure of precision, not an excess of it.32
The story I told wrong
Years ago, in a parish I served, a man walked in as a seeker. He was maybe a year off parole, and he found his way into the recovery Bible study I led. The community did what communities are for: it embraced him. He was fed, in every sense that word will bear. And then, during the very season the church was forming him toward confirmation, he fell — back into the old self-destructive patterns, and his fall was not private; it endangered someone he loved.
So I did the thing the rubric assumes a priest will do, in consultation with my bishop and inside the safeguards the rubric builds. I fenced the table. Not to punish him — the rubric forbids that reading in so many words — but for the protection of the one being harmed. The discipline was love aimed at the wronged, and it condemned the deed while refusing, absolutely, to release the man.
He stayed. That is the part I need you to hear first: the bond was never severed. And about eighteen months after he first walked through the door — after the discipline, after the repentance the rubric’s until waits for — the bishop laid hands on him before the congregation, and he was confirmed.
More than a decade later, hands were laid on him a second time. He was ordained a deacon. The man once barred from the table now serves at it. I say this as someone who knows the weight of those hands from the inside — hands were laid on me once, too.
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Now the confession, because this essay has been circling it from the first paragraph. When I began preparing this piece, I told that story as my best example of the bond held without the rite. I actually formed the sentence: I never saw a reinstatement ceremony performed. I had just finished writing about Leo’s welcome-back — history I taught for years — and I told my own best story with the reincorporation missing.
Only afterward, going back over it, did I see what I had been present for: discipline, then repentance, then the bishop’s hands, then the table. The parish had performed the forgotten rite whole, in its original order, and no one recognized it at the time — not the congregation, not the bishop’s calendar, and not the priest who taught its history. I stood inside the ceremony this whole essay says the West has lost, and I could not see it, because I too had forgotten what it was.
That is what the missing ceremony does to a people. It does not only leave our outcasts unrestored. It deforms the memory of the restorations we have actually witnessed, so that even the welcome-backs we perform get filed as something smaller — a milestone, a nice service, a graduation.
The forgetting I have been diagnosing all essay was operating inside the diagnostician, mid-diagnosis. I did not like that arithmetic either. But I trust it, because of where it points: the apparatus is not only in the attic. Sometimes it is on the lawn, running, unrecognized.
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So let me say plainly what I believe happened in that parish, because the grammar matters more than anything else in this essay: God always acts to bring about the good God desires for us, and in that case, this man, who’d had such a hard life, was led to a community, fed, found hope in discovering he’d been found, fell off the wagon and back into self-destructive patterns, was nonetheless embraced with discipline by that community, and ultimately was blessed by becoming a blessing to many.
Notice the verbs, and notice their voice. Led. Fed. Found. Embraced. Blessed. The community fenced the table and the bishop laid the hands, but the sentence only parses with an agent none of us saw.33
The question this essay cannot answer
So: shame is the bond’s monitor. Every community runs it. The only live question, for a person or a people, is which side of the fork gets institutionalized — restoration or expulsion, the Prodigal’s homecoming or the permanent file. A community that has lost its ceremonies of reacceptance has not become less shame-driven. It has become worse at shame — all verdict, no absolution.
And the philosopher’s word for what such a community carries is exact: a failure to know is mere ignorance, an absence; but a failure to acknowledge “is the presence of something” — a confusion, an indifference, a coldness. “Spiritual emptiness is not a blank.”34
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But the fork, as I have drawn it so far, explains a community’s treatment of one member at a time: one deed, one shaming, one restoration or one expulsion. It does not yet explain the thing this run exists to explain — the stadium, the crowd, the timeline at full boil; ten thousand nervous systems flipping into the same state in the same hour, certain of the same enemy, moved by the same wound.35 A monitor that lives in individual bodies somehow fires in synchrony across a whole people.
How does one feeling take ten thousand bodies at once?
That is the next essay.
Endnotes
A note on the notes. This essay runs on two voices: the argument above the line, and a quieter scholarly one below it. Some notes are bare citations; many are small essays in their own right. The undervoice carries the machinery so the argument can stay speakable — follow it if you want the sources and the second thoughts, or stay above the line and lose nothing of the story.
1. Branded, NBC, January 24, 1965–April 24, 1966 (48 episodes, two seasons); Chuck Connors as Capt. Jason McCord. The premise — the Bitter Creek massacre; McCord’s silence to shield the reputation of Gen. James Reed; the accusation of cowardice false — and the title-sequence details (buttons, epaulettes, saber broken and cast down, the fort gates) verify against the standard references and the surviving footage (
); Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 9th ed. (Ballantine, 2007), s.v. “Branded.” Theme by Dominic Frontiere and Alan Alch; one line quoted under fair use. ↩
2. The formation was liturgical, not merely informational: we are shaped, below the level of argument, by the rites we repeatedly undergo, and a weekly degradation ceremony on afternoon television is a cultural liturgy forming its watchers’ loves toward the logic of the mark. See James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009) and You Are What You Love (Brazos, 2016). The danger of such liturgies is not that they fail to form but that they mis-form — which is also why the emptied rites of return, and the degradation machinery of the feed, do real work on us whether or not we are paying attention. ↩
3. Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain, 2nd ed. (W. W. Norton, 2014), ch. 1 (the “social synapse”). ↩
4. Dave Matthews Band, “The Space Between,” by David J. Matthews and Glen Ballard, on Everyday (RCA, 2001). One phrase quoted; the rest paraphrased. ↩
5. Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (Scribner’s, 1902), 183–184 (the looking-glass self; the three-moment formulation is Cooley’s own). That the self is intersubjective is not only the empirical finding these essays lean on but a conceptual necessity: Donald Davidson’s “triangulation” argument holds that determinate mental content is possible only for a creature in communication with another creature about a shared world — the subjective, the intersubjective, and the objective arrive together or not at all. See Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. “Three Varieties of Knowledge” and “Rational Animals.” As with McDowell and Cavell (note 7), Davidson enters here as argument, not as empirical evidence. ↩
6. The move from the science to “a doctrine of creation” is deliberate but disciplined. That persons are constituted in relation reflects, at the creaturely level, the God who is himself Communion — three persons in mutual indwelling — in whose image the human is made (the “onto-relational” person of T. F. Torrance). But the relation is analogical: the social bond is a created echo of the uncreated Communion, not an instance of it, and the Creator/creature distinction survives the likeness. The science describes the echo; it does not climb the analogy to its source. (As at note 7, the register here is theological witness, not empirical inference.) The same relationally-constituted self is the apostle Paul’s: a person who is porous rather than bounded, made up from outside by the powers and relations that indwell and act within it, its true constitution being union with the Messiah — an anthropology Susan Eastman reconstructs in explicit conversation with the very attachment-and-developmental science these essays use (Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology[Eerdmans, 2017]). ↩
7. A word to any reader who has been told that all of this — attachment, affect, the body’s long tuition in love — is “worldly wisdom,” and that the Word makes it unnecessary. The choice being pressed there is not a real choice. It presupposes a picture of nature as bare mechanism, emptied of meaning, over against which the things of God must stand as rivals — a picture philosophy has learned to call optional, and shallow at that. The better account is very old, and John McDowell has restated it for our time: recovering Aristotle’s insight that virtue is second nature, he observes that our nature is largely second nature — we are born animals and become persons through upbringing, habituation, initiation into a form of life; reason and love are not occult powers added to our animal being but a shape our animal being can take. The science in these essays describes how that second nature is laid down; the scriptures we read at weddings — the Song’s love strong as death, the apostle’s love that binds everything together in perfect harmony — describe the shape it is made for. These are not two authorities in competition. They are the how and the what of one creature — and the tradition has always known it: grace does not abolish nature; it perfects it. The love those texts sing over every marriage keeps its promises by knowing the beloved, not by refusing to. — Sources: John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1996): “our nature is largely second nature” (87, restated 91), “our upbringing, our Bildung“ (87), “having one’s eyes opened to reasons at large by acquiring a second nature” (84), and the disenchanted picture that “makes our capacity to respond to reasons look like an occult power, something extra to our being the kind of animals we are, which is our situation in nature” (83); and “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard University Press, 1998), 167–197 — the disenchanted equation “metaphysically shallow” (186), second nature as “a formed state of practical reason” (192). Ancestral text Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II; the wedding lections (Song of Songs 8:6; Colossians 3:14, cf. 1:17; Ephesians 3:14–19; John 15:9–12; cf. BCP 1979, 426) — no one passage foregrounded; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2 — “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province) — the scholastic maxim gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit; cf. Kevin W. Hector, Theology Without Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2011). A caution on how far these philosophers are load-bearing (this governs note 21 and note 34 as well): McDowell and Cavell supply a framework and a witness, not evidence. McDowell says what kind of thing formation is; the developmental mechanics — attunement, affect regulation, epistemic trust — rest on the attachment-and-affect literature carried by Essays 12–13 (Schore, Porges, Fonagy, Cozolino), cited there on their own evidential terms. He explicitly declines to found the life of reason on “facts of the sort that the natural sciences discover.” Cavell (notes 21, 34) enters the same way: as existential-literary witness to what acknowledgment is, never as clinical data. The standing objections to “second nature” (Crispin Wright, Hubert Dreyfus) do not touch the narrow claim borrowed here. ↩
8. Thomas J. Scheff, “Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory,” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (2000): 84–99, at 97 (”even the slightest threat to the bond”). Scheff’s “bond affect” is the sociological name for what this project, following Donald Nathanson, calls the affect of communion — shame as the affect governing our very interest and enjoyment in connection, so that its firing registers the bond’s rupture (Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self [Norton, 1992]). Nathanson’s Compass of Shame names the four scripts by which unacknowledged shame is deflected — withdrawal, attack-self, avoidance, attack-other — two of which organize this essay: the self-exile of those who expel themselves before they can be expelled (withdrawal and attack-self) and the pile-on of those who expel others (attack-other). ↩
9. Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (International Universities Press, 1971) — the transcript analyses (shame markers “far outranking markers of all other emotions combined,” and patient or therapist “almost never” naming them); as summarized in Scheff, “Shame and the Social Bond,” 94. ↩
10. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, cited through Scheff, “Shame and the Social Bond,” 89–90. (Standing discipline: Elias through Scheff only.) ↩
11. Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (the shame–rage “feeling trap”); as generalized in Scheff, “Shame and the Social Bond,” 95, and in Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger, Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington, 1991). The two branches of the fork have a developmental substrate: the acknowledgedbranch is interactive repair — the rupture-and-repair rhythm by which attuned partners restore a bond (Edward Tronick’s still-face paradigm; Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self [Norton, 2003]) — and which branch is taken is tilted, below awareness, by the polyvagal neuroception of safety or threat (Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory [Norton, 2011]). ↩
12. John Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55–57 (the family-model paradigm, ch. 4) and 86–87 (the formal four-feature definition, ch. 7). ↩
13. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, 55 and 87. “Master status” is originally Everett C. Hughes’s term, carried into labeling theory and by Braithwaite. ↩
14. Braithwaite on criminal subcultures as stigma’s product: Crime, Shame and Reintegration, 67–68 (ch. 4) and 88–89 (ch. 7). On the contemporary ecclesial pattern — populations formed by expulsion rather than unbelief — see Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People Are DONE with Church but Not Their Faith (Group, 2015); the claim here is a pattern-prediction the qualitative reporting supports, not a measured cascade finding (see note 15). ↩
15. Braithwaite on the Japan exhibit — the mushi and the station chief who resigns — Crime, Shame and Reintegration, 63–64 (ch. 4); on interdependency and communitarianism as the two conditions, 69–73 (ch. 6). Two candor items. First, the Japan ethnography behind Braithwaite’s exhibit is contested and, in places, dated; this essay leans on the mechanism he demonstrates — interdependency plus a communitarian idiom make reintegration deliverable — not on Japan as portrait. Second, the ex-evangelical, deconstruction, and church-refugee populations named above: where sociologists have interviewed the “dones,” the expulsion pattern is what they hear, but the sizes and trajectories remain estimates, not measured findings. ↩
16. “Degradation ceremonies” is Harold Garfinkel’s term: “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 5 (1956): 420–424. The asymmetry on which this section turns — that the West runs degradation ceremonies in abundance while “providing almost no place in the culture for ceremonies to decertify deviance” — and the identification of the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting as a surviving rite of decertification are John Braithwaite’s: Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 10, 151–152. “Decertification”/”ceremonies to decertify deviance” is Braithwaite’s own phrase. ↩
17. The essay’s economy of verdict-and-remission — “the debt is paid, the person is restored” — speaks the Second Temple grammar of sin-as-debt and its ceremonies of release, on which see Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (Yale University Press, 2009), with the Jubilee of Leviticus 25 (debts remitted, land returned, persons freed) as its civilizational-scale instance. That the essay speaks this debt-idiom is description, not endorsement: sin-as-debt is the community’s forensic language of verdict and sentence, while the grace that lifts the debt is gift — unconditional, non-competitive, neither exchange nor satisfaction — consistent with this series’ incarnational (Wells) rather than transactional soteriology; see Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace(Westminster John Knox, 2005), and Christ the Key (Cambridge University Press, 2010). ↩
18. The rite of the metzora (Hebrew mĕṣōrāʿ, conventionally “leper,” though the condition is a ritual skin-impurity, not Hansen’s disease). The exclusion — dwelling outside the camp, torn clothes, unbound hair, the cry “Unclean, unclean” — is Leviticus 13:45–46; the rite of return, in which the priest goes outside the camp to the person and performs the two-bird ceremony (one bird killed over living water, one dipped in its blood and released alive), followed by a seven-day passage and eighth-day offerings, is Leviticus 14:1–20. The daubing of blood on the restored person’s right ear, right thumb, and right great toe (14:14) repeats the consecration of the priests at their ordination (Leviticus 8:23–24): reintegration performed as re-consecration. See Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible 3 (Doubleday, 1991), ad loc. That the priest goes out to the person, rather than requiring the outcast to return unaided, is the pattern Samuel Wells calls “being with” — presence that comes to the afflicted in their affliction rather than working on them from a distance (A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God [Wiley-Blackwell, 2015]); it is the incarnational shape this whole series commends. Read in the register of the body, the same gesture is neuroception of safety made liturgical — a regulated community cueing safety to a nervous system braced for expulsion, co-regulation at ceremonial scale (Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory [Norton, 2011]). This machinery is ancient and canonical — not evidence that Israel was uniquely merciful; the same Torah legislates permanent exclusions (e.g., Deuteronomy 23:2–8). ↩
19. The channel of inheritance runs through the Jesus Movement, which continued rather than replaced Israel’s practice of return. Jesus heals the man with the skin-disease and sends him to the priest to perform exactly the Levitical rite of note 18 — “offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded” (Mark 1:40–44) — and makes table fellowship with “sinners” a standing scandal of reintegration (Luke 15:1–2). Paul then institutionalizes it: he orders the Corinthians to restore the offender they had disciplined — “forgive and comfort him … reaffirm your love for him,” lest he be “overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (2 Corinthians 2:5–11); to “restore [him] in a spirit of gentleness” (Galatians 6:1); to “welcome one another as [Messiah] has welcomed you” (Romans 15:7). And he grounds the whole in a reconciliation that is explicitly not a settling of accounts: God “not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). On Paul’s participatory rather than contractual frame, see Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God (Eerdmans, 2009). ↩
20. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, 86 (ch. 7) — reintegrative shaming in “the Christian tradition of ‘hate the sin and love the sinner’”; and 150–151 (ch. 10) — the Prodigal Son “hardly one of our leading folk heroes.” The reinvestiture the parable stages — the best robe, the ring, the sandals — is Luke 15:22, the ceremonial inverse of the fort’s stripping. ↩
21. Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (updated ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002), at 237: “Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)” On the register in which Cavell is being used, see the caution appended to note 7. ↩
22. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.63.1 (Folger Library Edition, 2:290.20–31), as cited in Craig David Uffman, “How the Mind of Christ is Formed in Community: The Ecclesial Ethics of Richard Hooker” (doctoral thesis, Durham University, 2015). Hooker’s subject is belief: “the first thing required of him which standeth for admission into Christ’s family is belief. Which belief consisteth not so much in knowledge as in acknowledgement of all things that heavenly wisdom revealeth.” ↩
23. The point is deliberately neither Donatist nor pragmatist. Not Donatist: the efficacy of a reintegrative or sacramental rite does not depend on the sincerity or moral state of its ministers or participants — a rite performed without inner assent is not thereby void. Not pragmatist: the practice is not justified by the good effects it produces — the reduction Stanley Hauerwas has spent a career refusing — as though mimetic practices earned their standing by working. Their efficacy is the Spirit’s; the practices are instruments of a divine agency that gives what they signify. On how such mimetic, participatory practices form their participants, with the Spirit named as their agent, see the argument of my Hooker study (note 22). What fails in the hollow rite is therefore not the rite and not the grace but the community’s reception and formation — Cavell’s acknowledgment (note 21) withheld at the scale of a people: everything given, and no one present to be formed by it. This also guards against mistaking repetition for the problem: mimetic practice is not hollow merely because it precedes full understanding — “putting on” a rite or a virtue one does not yet inhabit is, in the classical account, the very scaffolding by which the affect is formed toward it (Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting On Virtue [University of Chicago Press, 2008]; James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom[Baker Academic, 2009]). Hollowness is not repetition but abandonment — a community that has ceased to mean what it still performs — which is why the essay locates it in forgetting, not in rote. ↩
24. Two horizons this essay only gestures toward, and later essays take up. First, the christological: the reconciliation these rites announce is not one the community manufactures but one God has already accomplished and freely gives — gift, not transaction (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, on the objective reconciliation of the world, read with this series’ incarnational, non-satisfaction grammar). Second, the eschatological: reintegration is a foretaste of the final homecoming, the age to come breaking into the present — which is why the Spirit who works the rite is the Spirit as the presence of God’s future (Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 [Oxford University Press, 1999]), and why the community performs it most fully at the Table. Here it is enough to plant the seeds. ↩
25. In the vocabulary of republican political theory, the person held under an unappealable, unaccountable verdict is not merely excluded but dominated — subject to arbitrary power without recourse, which is the unfreedom (freedom as non-domination) Philip Pettit sets against mere non-interference: one may be left entirely alone and still be unfree, if one stands under a power that could rule on one arbitrarily (Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government [Oxford University Press, 1997]; On the People’s Terms [Cambridge University Press, 2012]). Read so, a decertification ceremony is a republican act — the restoration of a member to non-dominated standing; a verdict made revocable is a power made accountable. ↩
26. The distance between being known and being received has a developmental name: epistemic trust — the capacity to take another’s communication as reliable and meant for oneself. Shame closes it, which is why the marked person cannot metabolize even a forgiveness sincerely offered (the foreclosed channel of Essay 13), and why a rite of return must reopen epistemic trust rather than merely announce a verdict into a closed system. See Peter Fonagy and Elizabeth Allison, “The Role of Mentalizing and Epistemic Trust in the Therapeutic Relationship,” Psychotherapy 51, no. 3 (2014): 372–380. ↩
27. The pastoral claim here is Paul Tillich’s, from the sermon “You Are Accepted”: grace is the courage to accept that one is accepted “in spite of” being unacceptable — “do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything; simply accept the fact that you are accepted” (The Shaking of the Foundations [Scribner’s, 1948]). This essay adds what Tillich’s existential frame left out: acceptance is not only an inward act of the solitary self but something a community must enact between persons, ceremonially — acceptance socialized. ↩
28. On physician health programs and restoration to practice, see A. T. McLellan, G. S. Skipper, M. Campbell, and R. L. DuPont, “Five Year Outcomes in a Cohort Study of Physicians Treated for Substance Use Disorders in the United States,” BMJ 337 (2008): a2038; cf. the Federation of State Physician Health Programs. ↩
29. Leo the Great, Ep. 159.7 (to Nicetas of Aquileia, AD 458; PL 54), cf. Ep. 166.2 — the earliest application of the church’s Latin confirmare to the rite, in the context of receiving people back into eucharistic fellowship. A note on the modesty of the claim:the body asserts vocabulary, gesture, and theology — not a full origin thesis. The scholarly consensus origin of Confirmation as a separate rite is the post-baptismal episcopal hand-laying that came detached from baptism as dioceses grew; Aidan Kavanagh’s rival thesis (that the rite began as a liturgical dismissal) is noted and not adopted. What stands on the sources here: Leo’s letters are the earliest surviving “confirm” usage for the rite, in a reception-back context; the same era reconciled public penitents by penance completed, the bishop’s hands, and return to the table (the old Ash Wednesday–Maundy Thursday discipline); and Faustus defined the noun as strengthening for the strife (note 30). The essay’s inference — reacceptance machinery of the highest ceremonial grade, forgotten — is drawn from those footings and marked as an inference. ↩
30. Faustus of Riez, Pentecost homily (transmitted in the Eusebius Gallicanus collection, s. V): “we are reborn in baptism for life; we are confirmed after baptism for the strife” — via Maxwell E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation, rev. ed. (Liturgical Press, 2007), 185; cf. Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 215–225 (the Ash Wednesday liturgy and its reconciliation-of-penitents history) and 320–335 (Confirmation and the initiation rites); J. D. C. Fisher, Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West (SPCK, 1965). ↩
31. The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 409 (the Disciplinary Rubrics); “An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church,” s.v. “Excommunication,” episcopalchurch.org. The quoted phrases: exclusion “intended to encourage repentance and not meant to be a punishment”; “until the person has given clear proof of repentance and amendment of life”; “until they have made restitution for the wrong they have done, or have at least promised to do so”; those who “desire and promise to make up for their faults”; penitents at the point of death “may not be refused”; and the glossary’s own concession that “in pastoral practice, the disciplinary rubric for excommunication is rarely used.” ↩
32. The mechanical symmetry of the two operators is not a symmetry of power: a shared psychology across an asymmetry of coercive and institutional force is not “both sides” equivalence, the distinction the later essays keep sharp. And the mechanical account is not the whole machine: degradation is not only affective and ceremonial but structural— encoded in law, wage, and property — so that no amount of right feeling or better ceremony alone lifts the mark (Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism [Oxford University Press, 2021]). ↩
33. The proclamation’s grammar — God as the active subject of the saving verbs (led, fed, found, embraced, blessed) — is Israel’s characteristic mode of testimony; see Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Fortress, 1997). That God is named by these narrated verbs is not rhetorical flourish but theological method: the God of Israel and the gospel is identified by his acts, not by a deity lurking behind them (Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 [Oxford University Press, 1997]). The proclamation’s nearest scriptural ancestor is Joseph’s word to his brothers: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20) — a human fall overtaken by a divine intention working through it. The agency named here is non-competitive: God is not one cause among the causes in the story — neither an intervention that displaces the community’s act or the bishop’s, nor a providence merely cheering them on — but the transcendent ground in whom those secondary causes do their real work. This is classical theism’s rule, not a process or interventionist one; see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Blackwell, 1988), and David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (Yale University Press, 2013). ↩
34. Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” at 243: “A ‘failure to know’ might just mean a piece of ignorance, an absence of something, a blank. A ‘failure to acknowledge’ is the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness. Spiritual emptiness is not a blank.” The body quotes “is the presence of something” and closes on “Spiritual emptiness is not a blank” (Cavell verbatim), and selects three of Cavell’s five nouns (confusion, indifference, coldness). Register per note 7. ↩
35. Several dimensions this essay only gestures toward, and the coming essays on the crowd take up. The permanent mark has a genealogy that is racial and colonial (Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination [Yale University Press, 2010]), and its counter-vision is belonging (Jennings, After Whiteness [Eerdmans, 2020]); the community capable of both shaming and restoring must be thick enough to be a polis, not a voluntary association of strangers (Stanley Hauerwas); degradation at scale is finally a sovereign act — a community or state constituting itself by deciding who is cast out, the marked one made a sacrificial figure (Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [Columbia University Press, 2011]) — to which the counter-liturgy is the Eucharist, which re-members the excluded body (William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist [Blackwell, 1998]); and both “operators” will be found selling a counterfeit belonging purchased by someone else’s exclusion (Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life [Eerdmans, 2019]). Here it is enough to name the seeds. ↩