The verb “shrive” means to absolve someone.
The main Shriver in the news today, of course, is Maria — the First Lady of Cal-ee-for-nee-uh — who apparently made the decision Sunday morning to endorse the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, less than a week after her husband, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, endorsed Republican John McCain.
Over the past couple of weeks, PBS has aired a documentary about her father, Sargent Shriver, whose family was cankrupted in the Crash of 1929, led an anti-aircraft battery on a destroyer in World War II, worked at Newsweek, married into the Kennedy family before it was cool, ran the Peace Corps for JFK, ran the War on Poverty for LBJ, ran with George McGovern in 1972, and continued to do good works for another thirty years after that.
American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver is a moving piece of work, and there are a number of video clips available, not the least of which is the first, describing how Shriver pressed presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to openly call Coretta Scott King on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was sentenced to four months of hard labor in Georgia for a traffic violation.