It’s a little ironic that apologia, the Greek root of the word “apology,” basically means self-defense. Perhaps that’s also the root of what appears to be widespread confusion about what constitutes an apology. Jumping into the breach, I offer a public-service announcement in the hope of helping to set that right. An apology is something …
Revenge or restitution? I’ve been thinking of Paulo Freire’s powerful notion of a thematic universe. He wrote that every epoch is characterized by “a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites.” This complex, interacting whole—our thematic universe—weaves the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Conventionally, historians propose …