"Excommunication" is a word in LAW AND LEGAL, ENGLISH
A sentence of censure prouounced by one of the spiritual courts for offenses falling under ecclesiastical cognizance. It is described in the books
The act of communicating or ejecting; esp., an
ecclesiastical censure whereby the person against whom it is pronounced
is, for the time, cast out of the communication of the church;
exclusion from fellowship in things spiritual.
The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the café parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman's smile. Because if you're forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you've simply chosen to live alone, you're easily flattered by a young woman's seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.
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In ecclesiastical law. A spiritual punishment, consisting in withdraw-ing from a baptized person (whether be-longing to the clergy or the …
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