expiative


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Adj.1.expiative - having power to atone for or offered by way of expiation or propitiation; "expiatory (or propitiatory) sacrifice"
expiatory, propitiatory
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I Confess is, as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol so neatly describe it in their Hitchcock: The First Forty-four Films (1979), "the story of a priest [Montgomery Clift] who is prisoner to the secret of the confessional." While the relationship between the presumably expiative act of confession and the extra-confessional effects of this weighty exchange between confessor and confessee does not inevitably set up any simplistic dualism between those two protagonists, it does announce polarity.
Robert Lepage's Le confessionnal & Le polygraphe: a rumination
To mollify inequity, like the rights afforded women, Islam has encouraged emancipation of a slave as a noble or expiative act.
Toward a theory of a Arab-Muslim women as activists in secular and religious movements

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