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All Apologies
Are today's kinda culpas more safe than sorry?
Nathan Bierma
Christianity Today online
July 1, 2004

The word apology initially meant "a speech in defense," and, as any parent will tell you, that's still what you're most likely to get when you ask a young child to apologize to a sibling. The Greek root survives today in the words apologia and apologetics, both of which can mean "a formal defense or justification" (The Apologia Project, for example, is dedicated to intellectual defenses of the Christian faith). Apology began to mutate in the late 16th century, shedding its sense of justification and beginning to bear regret and guilt, although it would be more than a century before the latter sense became the primary definition.

Today, politicians and other public figures tend to turn their apologies into apologetics. Evaluating former baseball player Pete Rose's recent autobiography and the statements of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in the documentary The Fog of War, Bruce Kuklick writes in Christianity Today's sister publication, Books & Culture, "Each man owns up to past blunders, but each refuses to admit any character defect; and each tries, in different ways, to deflect serious criticisms." Both, Kuklick says, come across as self-serving and low on remorse.

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