Do we really want to live in a culture of endless blame when we’re all fallible? | Emma John

In a society riven by gotchas' and self-righteousness, let's be more ready to recognise our own failings and less hasty to judge others'

There's a communal prayer of penitence that is often used in Church of England services. In it, worshippers confess that they have sinned against their fellow humans in thought, and word, and deed; through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault". Concise yet powerful, it recognises the different ways we can harm each other. Sins of omission and of carelessness are no less damaging, or requiring of forgiveness, than those born of malice.

We live in a period when our personal contributions to systemic injustice, many of them unintentional, are becoming increasingly obvious. Our new age of enlightenment has illuminated any number of dark corners that society has long failed (or refused) to notice. Cricket, the sport I love, has just endured a particularly punishing month of reckoning. First, Azeem Rafiq's public testimony against his former county, Yorkshire, forced the English game to admit that its anti-racism stance wasn't worth the T-shirts it was printed on. Then, right before the Ashes, Australia's then-captain admitted sending sexually explicit messages to a colleague. In both cases, players, coaches and commentators found themselves suddenly jobless, while the sport's administrators have scrambled, with little dignity, to contain the fallout.