(n.) A means of repairing a sin committed, and obtaining pardon for it, consisting partly in the performance of expiatory rites, partly in voluntary submission to a punishment corresponding to the transgression. Penance is the fourth of seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church.
(v. t.) To impose penance; to punish.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Great Yuletide fun on ITV now: hilarious reparations as Dannii Minogue performs a selection of the biblical world's most hideous acts of penance in front of a panel of witheringly critical bisexual judges."
(2) The Vatican ordered O'Brien to undertake an unspecified period of "prayer and penance".
(3) The girls know they are expected to show a certain degree of penance.
(4) So next Sunday, he's going to murder blameless Father James as an enforced act of penance.
(5) On the contrary, I could name many ( many ) celebrities who I'd love to see forced into doing charity work and "giving back", as a penance for being smug, over-rewarded, self-obsessed wastes of space.
(6) In 2010, Admiral William McRaven, then the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, slaughtered a sheep in penance to a family that saw its members mistakenly killed by McRaven’s forces.
(7) The cardinal's resignation and removal from Scotland for six months of prayer and penance had cast doubt over an inquiry.
(8) But Harold Wilson, offended by a speech in which I had attacked the public schools, exiled me to the Foreign Office to do penance as minister of state.
(9) No longer obliged to play nice – as they did in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when they agreed to release €10.3bn in bailout money for Athens – they’d now be able to revive their demand that Greece live on ever more meagre rations in penance for its huge debts.
(10) The proposition also galvanized a generation of Latino politicians with long memories, who have effectively created a sanctuary state in California in subsequent years – offering driver’s licenses to folks without papers, providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students, officially telling la migra to butt out of state affairs – as penance for the sins of their predecessors.
(11) Though John’s midweek surgery leaves him sidelined for the season, Díaz has been working towards full fitness while Castillo has paid penance and was back in Pareja’s team for Sunday’s kickoff.
(12) The common understanding of prison is that it is a place of deprivation and penance rather than domestic comfort.
(13) Manchester United have got into the habit of treating their lopsided Premier League programme as a penance.
(14) But that old model is irreparably broken: the supermarket giant revealed last week that group pre-tax profits for the first six months of this year were almost completely wiped out by penance for past accounting sins and the collapsing profitability of the ailing UK chain.
(15) He paid the fines and, as a self-imposed additional penance, painted religious murals for various Baptist chapels around the city.
(16) Perhaps it was as a kind of penance that, under the Tories’ free schools programme, Hyman, now a qualified teacher, set up School 21 (a school for the 21st century, geddit?).
(17) O’Brien was Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric at the time, and he was ordered by the Vatican to spend a period of time in “prayer and penance”.
(18) Given all this, it's not surprising that ICT came to be regarded by schools as an onerous obligation and by children as a tiresome penance inflicted on them by adults who seemed to have no idea about the online world.
(19) Now perhaps these same people have accepted the austerity measures largely because they see them as a form of penance; this is even the language that their politicians have couched their policies in to sell them.
(20) Having already ticked off the home secretary and the education secretary for conducting their private feud in public, he sent the bulk of Eric Pickles to separate them on the front bench as they did their two-hour penance on the naughty step answering urgent questions in the Commons on extremism in schools.
Sacrament
Definition:
(n.) The oath of allegiance taken by Roman soldiers; hence, a sacred ceremony used to impress an obligation; a solemn oath-taking; an oath.
(n.) The pledge or token of an oath or solemn covenant; a sacred thing; a mystery.
(n.) One of the solemn religious ordinances enjoined by Christ, the head of the Christian church, to be observed by his followers; hence, specifically, the eucharist; the Lord's Supper.
(v. t.) To bind by an oath.
Example Sentences:
(1) Nevertheless, they differed in their motivations for use and their perceptions of its influence in their lives: some employed MDMA as a sacramental adjunct for following specific spiritual paths; others viewed it as aiding their spiritual growth in more general ways.
(2) Only the Putin era tells many such stories: the president taking sacrament on state-run television.
(3) Canon Robinson replied that he believed he was in a "sacramental relationship" with his long-term partner Mark Andrew, adding that it was a reflection of God's desire for humans to be in sexual relationships.
(4) It became one more holy object in the communal sacrament that, thanks to the gods of business, technology, and creativity, TV had become in the early 21st century.
(5) I think the person who said: 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament' was right.
(6) But this year, it is a major focus for evangelicals as well as for Roman Catholics.” Cruz, a Tea Party favorite who was elected to the Senate in 2012, once again invoked what he called the Obama administration’s “assault on our religious liberty” – name-checking everything from the supreme court’s Hobby Lobby contraception case to church groups helping the poor, and from abortion to “the sacrament of marriage”.
(7) United by the holy sacrament of marriage, they go off to America to teach.
(8) "For someone who's religious, marriage is a sacrament, and a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace," she said.
(9) In church eyes, any sacraments the cardinal had subsequently administered would be illicit.
(10) But the real spiritual argument happens in how her weirdly cut and twisting narratives unfold: a death foretold long before a person's story has even started, as in The Driver's Seat (1970) or The Hothouse by the East River (1973); the interest in how superstition and other forms of false consciousness precipitate evil actions, as in The Bachelors (1960) or The Girls of Slender Means (1963); the way an innocuous-looking catchphrase, like Miss Jean Brodie's famous "crème de la crème", attains a mysteriously sacramental force by dint of a rhythmic repetition, half-gossipy, half-incantatory in intent.
(11) Its hero, Lionel Espy, is a doubting cleric who is far more concerned with the church's social commitments than its sacramental obligations; as a result he is banished from the team-ministry he has created in south London.
(12) Almost all of us are somewhere on a spectrum of interpretation and we switch up and down that spectrum as ... we try to apply scripture to the concrete messiness of living.” Protestants, he added, “do not understand marriage as a sacrament but as a covenant voluntarily entered into by two persons who bind themselves to each other in a series of vows”.
(13) Hence Poussin's insistent structuring (which becomes strikingly experimental in a series of canvases sent to Cardinal Richelieu, the Seven Sacraments : the Dulwich has managed to borrow five of them to display alongside Cullinan's exhibition).
(14) In Vegas I had made a friend who shared my sacramental devotion to marijuana, my dilated obsession with gaming and my ballistic impatience to play GTA IV.
(15) He lends to the observation of nature the sense of something essentially sacramental.
(16) The Supreme Court now has established a legal precendent running contrary to previous lower court cases that has implications for the religious use of peyote, specifically, and for nontraditional use of sacramental drugs, generally.
(17) The monks were more exposed to contagion; obliged by their vocation and by pope's command to help the dyings and to give them sacraments, they were obliged to leave lepers to their fate.
(18) Our church denies women the ability to use modern technology and medicine to control their fertility, even though Pope Francis told us this year that we no longer “need to breed like rabbits.” Our church tells divorced people they have failed as Christians – even if the marriage was abusive or if their spouse was cheating on them – and denies them access to the sacraments.
(19) But before getting overly sanctimonious, journalism is not altogether a sacrament to truth.
(20) This is a dramatisation of the sacramental force of song: it has the power to make present what it represents, to conjure up the inspiration and protection it seeks.