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For many, the forms of corporate confession of sin—such as the General Confession—that occur in the public rites of the church are sufficient. For others, and I include myself, it is all too easy, as Julia Gatta and Martin Smith observe, to murmur the familiar penitential phrases along with the rest of the congregation without any real sense of personal sinfulness or, for that matter, of God’s healing and reconciling mercy and forgiveness proffered through the words of the absolution.
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