Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
It has been said that authors know how their books are going to end as they start at the beginning. If this is generally true, the present volume is a dramatic exception. Almost until the last moment of writing, I have lived with the anxiety of not been able to see quite where the book was going and how it would finish. It has been a confusing and daunting voyage of discovery, replete with wrong turns, false leads and conceptual mirages. In other words, this book is the product of a genuine process of research, with all the excitement and frustration that implies.
I owe substantial authorial debts. Alastair Campbell first stimulated my interest in shame by requiring me to write an essay on chronic guilt. His book The Gospel of Anger also offered an important, inspiring model of how practical theologians might begin to think about emotions. Donald Capps, an American pastoral theologian, always seems to have visited the topics I am interested in before me. His own work on shame, though I am sometimes sharply critical of it, has been a constant stimulus to me. Alex Wright at Cambridge University Press commissioned this volume and encouraged me enormously by reading it in draft. I am grateful to him and to his successor, Kevin Taylor, for the patience they have exercised in waiting for it gradually to emerge. On the technical side of this book's production, I would also like to thank Joanne Hill, the assiduous copy-editor at the Press who greatly improved the text in the final stages of its production, and James Woodward, an old friend who kindly compiled the index.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.