Bring Back the "S Word"

We'd love to get the word "sin" back into everyday discourse. Whatta coup that would be: Bill Clinton sinned with Monica Lewinsky; Michael Jackson is accused of atrocious sinning; Stealing from a client's trust fund is a sin.

We never held out much hope for the word's rehabilition. There's too much relativism in the cultural landscape.

But then we saw the following words by a self-described bleeding-heart liberal. Maybe there's hope:

Is the idea of sin dead? It sometimes feels that way. Take politicians. On a good day, they are hypocrites; on a bad day, they are liars. But only rarely do we accuse them of pride, which is, it seems to me, their real problem. The same goes for fat people. Assailed by the hateful rise of fast-food outlets pushing sandwiches the size of the Mir Space Station, they are victims; they require our sympathy and encouragement. But do we ever call them gluttons? Not unless we want the poor things to develop an eating disorder (or to be visited by, God forbid, Dr Gillian McKeith, Channel 4's stool-obsessed nutritionist). In the age of self-help, even red-hot anger is an illness. Once, people fell on their knees and prayed for the strength to master it. Now, they go on courses to learn how to "manage" it.

These are the introductory words of a review of Wendy Wasserstein's Sloth. The rest of the article is all right, but not really worth a click. But here it is in case you want it.