expiation

But “Runaway Train” the book is not some weepy expiation for past sins, a Hollywood reclamation job designed to kick-start a once-buzzy career.

Art uses life to its own ends; it doesn’t offer expiation to its subjects.

The sisters’ mission statement is “the expiation of stigmatic guilt and the promulgation of universal joy,” but since their inception, they’ve been called diabolical and anti-Catholic and accused by their detractors of mocking Catholic nuns.

“Until it is returned at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about.”

“White on White” appears to target the way some white people find comfort in rituals of performative expiation.