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.