(n.) The act of making satisfaction or atonement for any crime or fault; the extinguishing of guilt by suffering or penalty.
(n.) The means by which reparation or atonement for crimes or sins is made; an expiatory sacrifice or offering; an atonement.
(n.) An act by which the treats of prodigies were averted among the ancient heathen.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Punishment is legitimate and expiation is probably good, but that isn't the end of the story.
(2) He had wanted to expiate the ghost of past losses, in particular banishing the spectre of Neil Kinnock’s unexpected defeat in 1992.
(3) Like The Guard, Calvary is tartly, tightly scripted; unlike it, it's a pious piece of work, a serious investigation of expiation.
(4) Seeing old Kuhn, a religious man, praying aloud and thanking God he has been spared selection for the gas chamber, Levi is furious that Kuhn does not realise it will be his turn next, that "what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory power, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again … If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer."
(5) In her own history there is a sin that is expiated or atoned for symbolically by the sacrifice of the child--explainable in terms of the theory of opponent-process learning.
(6) As these fantasies are compromise formations, the analytic method can detect motives from all their component elements, that is to say various instinctual gratifications, defenses against anxiety, depressive affect or both, and superego contributions, whose motives may be said to be punishment, expiation or undoing.
(7) The termination of his political career was long overdue and fully deserved; yet even now his former supporters, up to and including William Hague, seek to expiate their own guilt by piling on the opprobium.
(8) A blasphemy, too, even to think of pardon or expiation.
(9) They, or many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie that America’s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only through ever greater ‘diversity.’ The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor.
(10) The crime against Saudi law which he is supposed to expiate is simply that he ran a website called, with dreadful irony, Free Saudi Liberals.